Is Human Composting the Future
of Urban Burial?
Laura Yan
Pacific Standard
Funeral
practices hide death from view, often at the expense of the
environment. Can we die with dignity — in a way that saves the
Earth — simply by embracing death?
A Tibetan
Buddhist meditation goes: Death is
certain, when life is uncertain, so what should you
do? The meditation is meant to make us
reflect on the way we live, but it also raises questions about what
happens when we die. What’s the last thing you want to leave
behind? Is it a cherished memory, a legacy of your life and art? Is
it a toll on an already overburdened environment?
Each year,
over 30 million board-feet of hardwood and 90,000 tons of steel are
buried in coffins: enough wood to build 40 single-family homes.
Some 1.6 million tons of reinforced concrete and 17,000 tons of
steel and copper go into building vaults — enough to re-build the Golden Gate
Bridge every year — and
enough formaldehyde, a carcinogen, is used in embalming to fill 1.2
Olympic-sized swimming pools. Even cremation, a popular and
seemingly simple option, comes at a high
cost: It releases 600 million pounds of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere each year.
A green
funeral movement is starting to push for eco-conscious burials in
natural environments, but it still distances the living from the
dead. For city dwellers, architect Katrina Spade has come up with a
surprising solution. Spade was studying architecture in a graduate
program at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst when she learned
about livestock composting from a friend, and wondered if she could
apply the same process to humans. The sketches for that concept
became her graduate thesis, and the beginnings of
the Urban Death
Project.
Spade calls
this new process “re-composition.” It’s a “gentle” way to describe
human composting without the association with garbage and food.
Re-composition is about giving death a chance to re-grow into new
life, and Spade imagines it taking place constantly, all around us,
in facilities scattered across neighborhoods like library
branches.
Future
families will bring the deceased, wrapped in a linen shroud, to a
re-composition center, a building with a three-story center where
the bodies are placed. The laying in of the body “[begins] the
transformation,” Spade explains. The nitrogen rich bodies are laid
on top of a pile of carbon-rich woodchips and sawdust and allowed
to break down, creating a nutrient rich, soil-like substance. The
heat released from the chemical reaction should kill common
pathogens and extinguish any smells. With human bodies, there are a
few more factors to work out, like how to decompose bones or teeth.
After four to six weeks, the bodies (including the bones) break
down and turn into about a cubic yard of compost, which can be used
to plant memorial gardens or trees.
According
to Spade, in future re-composition centers, there will also be
staff “trained in grieving deeper and in more participatory ways
than we’re used to.” The death care staff signals a different kind
of funeral practice, a more intimate relationship with death. They
are trained to support families that want to have home funerals,
for instance, where families help prepare the body for
burial — washing it,
wrapping it, handling it, and carrying it to the facility. Family
and friends will be able to design a personal
laying-in ceremony according to their faiths and preferences:
“music, silence, candles, conversations, whatever
works.”
There are
advocates within the funeral industry pushing for a more gracious,
personal death, but, according to Nora Menkin, a funeral director
at the Co-op Funeral Home of People’s Memorial in Seattle,
Washington, (and a board advisor on the Urban Death Project),
re-composition isn’t fully on the death industry’s radar yet. The
conversation is growing, and Menkin hopes
beyond just a small community of death care experts: “I think it’s
a time that people are realizing that you don’t have to blindly
follow what is traditional,” she says.
“We drive
death to the outskirts of society, literally.”
Current
conventional funeral practices are mostly built around our
discomforts around death. Instead of facing death as a natural
process and talking about how to prepare for it, we avoid it until
it is too late. We hire funeral directors to make important
decisions and embalm bodies to hide signs of decay. We construct
elaborate rituals, buy extravagant caskets, and build ornate vaults
to shroud the inevitable process of decomposition. We hide grief
behind ritual.
Spade, a
38-year-old architect from New Hampshire, was born to a family of
doctors and aware of death from an early age. She grew up on a
13-acre farm, surrounded by lush, growing things and their decay.
She remembers seeing the farm animals slaughtered, or learning when
a patient of her parents died. Death was never taboo, and she wants
to bring that openness about death to our cultural
reality.
“The main
thing we’re trying to provide is really a beautiful space unlike
what we have,” Spade says. “A framework for ritual,” free from
religious affiliations or needless tradition.
Spade has
seen many places around the world —
from other cities in the United States to Canada,
India, Australia, and the United Kingdom — express interest in building
re-composition centers, but making it a
worldwide phenomenon still has its challenges. Re-composition has
yet to become legal. It’s not illegal currently, per se; each state
in the U.S. makes its own laws about disposition methods. Some
states don’t have any restrictions, while others limit it to
burial, cremation, or the donation of a body to science. Restricted
states have been adding new methods to their approved lists, like
alkaline hydrolysis, a kind of “green cremation,” so there is a
precedent for re-composition, but legislation hurdles can still
spring up. For instance, according to Tanya Marsh, a professor of law at Wake Forest
University, Indiana legislature “voted to defeat a bill to permit
alkaline hydrolysis after a single legislator, who owns a casket
company, testified against the process.” The other obstacle, of
course, is in people’s minds, whether it’s coming to terms with the
notion of multiple bodies stacked in one facility, or turning a
person’s remains into gardening material.
Organizations like the Order of the Good Death are trying to encourage a
“death positive” attitude, in which conversation and thoughtfulness
replace denial and distance. Others are also devising eco-friendly
ways to innovate the funeral industry. A project
called Capsula
Mundi envisions cemeteries that
consist of trees growing on top of biodegradable pods that hold
bodies curled up in fetal position (or ashes in smaller capsules).
Artist Jae Rhim Lee came up with the concept for
the Infinity Burial Suit, a bodysuit you wear after death
that uses mushroom spores to eat away the body’s toxins, and,
eventually, the body itself. “For me, cultivating the Infinity
Mushroom is more than just scientific experimentation … it’s a
step towards accepting the fact that someday I will die and decay.
It’s also a step towards taking responsibility for my own burden on
the planet,” Lee said in a 2011 TED talk.
Both of
those projects require green cemeteries that allow for eco-friendly
burials. Traditional funeral homes and cemeteries are offering more
green burial services, and they are growing in popularity: A
2015 survey from
the Green Burial Council reported that over 72 percent of green
burial providers saw an increase in demand for the service. The
problem with green burials, still, is finding the space. Although
the numbers of green cemeteries is increasing, they are still far
from cities where much of the world lives (in developed countries,
about 74 percent of the population lives in urban
areas).
“We drive
death to the outskirts of society, literally,” Menkin says. We try
hard to separate spaces for the living and the dead, but there’s
value in integrating death into everyday life. It’s exactly what
the UDP team is trying to do as it plans to build the first
prototype of a re-composition center on the University of
Washington campus in Seattle.
“I think
it’s the right historical moment for this project to work,” Spade
says. For her, the move toward eco-friendly death care options
mirror the “grief we’re all feeling for the state of the planet.”
The UDP team hopes to finish the approval process with the city of
Seattle by spring of 2017. After testing animal remains to make
sure the system works, they’ll invite human volunteers to
participate. “If everything goes well, 2023 is when we open the
doors to a full scale re-composition center,” Spade
says.
Having an
actual center will hopefully make a difference in how people think
about re-composition. Although memorial services will take priority
in the future re-composition center, it will also be open for tours
to the public. Visitors will be able to get used to the actual
facility, and, more importantly, get used to the presence of death.
They won’t have to drive far out of town for an annual visit to a
loved one’s grave — they’ll be able to wander the lush gardens of a UDP facility
during their lunch break, to “contemplate their mortality, or just
have a sandwich,” Spade says. The re-composition
centers will embrace death as a natural part of
life, rather than something to be frightened of.
Menkin
believes that the more participatory death that the UDP encourages
can be “healing and cathartic.” Adoptees of re-composition will be
able to see that “we’re still treating this vessel that held a
person once upon a time with dignity.” But this same involvement
could turn some off, especially those who prefer death to happen
behind closed doors. “We’re not advocating that everyone should go
this way,” Menkin says. It’s just about having more choices:
whether it’s the food we eat, the clothes we wear, or how we
die.