Disir
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- Sep 30, 2011
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Katrina Spade grew up on a dead-end dirt road in New Hampshire. Her family raised cows, and they ate what they raised. She watched the animals die -- sometimes naturally, sometimes slaughtered for food. Spade’s parents worked in the health-care industry and often spoke about their patients’ end-of-life struggles and their deaths. None of it was morbid to Spade. “From an early age,” she says, “I always had a good idea of the cycle of life.”
Later on, while she was pursuing a degree in architecture, Spade began thinking about Western death rituals. Dying is an inherent, natural part of life. Why, she wondered, did humans insist on being cremated or else embalmed with formaldehyde, sealed inside a lacquered casket and entombed in the ground? Both practices are harmful to the environment.
“They didn’t feel meaningful to me,” she says. “Back when I was thinking about cremation and burial, I didn’t want the very last thing I did on this earth to be toxic.”
In 2014, Spade launched the Urban Death Project, a nonprofit that later morphed into Recompose, a Seattle company that studies and advocates for the legalization of “natural organic reduction,” otherwise known as human composting. The process involves human remains being mixed with natural compounds in a vessel. After a month, the composted remains become soil that can be returned to the ground to help flowers and trees grow.
Now Washington is the first state to sanction and regulate that process, under a measure signed by Gov. Jay Inslee this week.
The new law comes amid a broader shift in attitudes about burial practices, particularly around their impact on the environment. Conventional burials introduce toxic chemicals into the ground and use up land and other valuable resources -- including some 30 million board feet of casket wood, 90,000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of concrete and 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid each year in America alone.
That’s one reason why cremation has been growing in popularity, from being used for 28 percent of American deaths in 2002 to more than half by 2016. (By 2035, an estimated 80 percent of deaths will result in cremation, according to the National Funeral Directors Association.) The process is less resource-intensive than burials, but it still has an environmental impact. A single cremation requires 28 gallons of fuel and releases 540 pounds of carbon dioxide into the air, along with trace amounts of other harmful chemicals such as carbon monoxide and mercury. On the whole, cremations in America release some 270,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year -- equivalent to the CO2 from 22,000 homes.
In short, “there are significant environmental problems” with both burial and cremation, Washington state Sen. Jamie Pedersen told The Washington Post. Pedersen introduced the human composting legislation after Spade, of Recompose, pitched the idea to him last year. The bill also legalizes alkaline hydrolysis, which turns bodies into liquid using a base such as lye. In the past 10 years, the Post reported, at least a dozen states have legalized that process.
Human Composting, Liquid Cremation: People Want to Go Green, Even After Death
Well, this is kind of creepy. I may need a wee bit more coffee to process this.
Later on, while she was pursuing a degree in architecture, Spade began thinking about Western death rituals. Dying is an inherent, natural part of life. Why, she wondered, did humans insist on being cremated or else embalmed with formaldehyde, sealed inside a lacquered casket and entombed in the ground? Both practices are harmful to the environment.
“They didn’t feel meaningful to me,” she says. “Back when I was thinking about cremation and burial, I didn’t want the very last thing I did on this earth to be toxic.”
In 2014, Spade launched the Urban Death Project, a nonprofit that later morphed into Recompose, a Seattle company that studies and advocates for the legalization of “natural organic reduction,” otherwise known as human composting. The process involves human remains being mixed with natural compounds in a vessel. After a month, the composted remains become soil that can be returned to the ground to help flowers and trees grow.
Now Washington is the first state to sanction and regulate that process, under a measure signed by Gov. Jay Inslee this week.
The new law comes amid a broader shift in attitudes about burial practices, particularly around their impact on the environment. Conventional burials introduce toxic chemicals into the ground and use up land and other valuable resources -- including some 30 million board feet of casket wood, 90,000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of concrete and 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid each year in America alone.
That’s one reason why cremation has been growing in popularity, from being used for 28 percent of American deaths in 2002 to more than half by 2016. (By 2035, an estimated 80 percent of deaths will result in cremation, according to the National Funeral Directors Association.) The process is less resource-intensive than burials, but it still has an environmental impact. A single cremation requires 28 gallons of fuel and releases 540 pounds of carbon dioxide into the air, along with trace amounts of other harmful chemicals such as carbon monoxide and mercury. On the whole, cremations in America release some 270,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year -- equivalent to the CO2 from 22,000 homes.
In short, “there are significant environmental problems” with both burial and cremation, Washington state Sen. Jamie Pedersen told The Washington Post. Pedersen introduced the human composting legislation after Spade, of Recompose, pitched the idea to him last year. The bill also legalizes alkaline hydrolysis, which turns bodies into liquid using a base such as lye. In the past 10 years, the Post reported, at least a dozen states have legalized that process.
Human Composting, Liquid Cremation: People Want to Go Green, Even After Death
Well, this is kind of creepy. I may need a wee bit more coffee to process this.
