Washington Could Become the First State To Compost the Dead (nbcnews.com) 219
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Washington could become the first state to embrace another funerary practice by making it legal to compost the dead. The method is called "recomposing" and claims to be cheaper and more environmentally friendly than traditional burial or cremation. It involves rapidly decomposing a body and converting the remains into soil. That nutrient-rich material can then be used to grow trees, flowers, and other new life. The alternative practice hinges on a bill that state senator Jamie Pedersen plans to introduce next month, according to NBC. It would legalize recomposing in Washington where burial and cremation are currently the only acceptable ways to dispose of human remains. A public-benefit corporation, Recompose, is responsible for the actual composting. "The transformation of human to soil happens inside our reusable, hexagonal recomposition vessels," Recompose states in an FAQ. "When the process has finished, families will be able to take home some of the soil created, while gardens on-site will remind us that all of life is interconnected."
"The process utilizes a 5-foot-by-10-foot pod full of organic 'tinder' such as straw and wood chips," reports Motherboard. "Thermophilic or heat-loving microbes then metabolize the remains, maintaining an internal temperature of 131 degrees Fahrenheit within the vessel. The entire ritual takes one month, and produces a cubic yard of compost, according to Recompose." Non-organic materials such as artificial hips will be screened for and recycled, and people will certain illnesses may be ineligible since some pathogens may be resistant to the composting process.
"The process utilizes a 5-foot-by-10-foot pod full of organic 'tinder' such as straw and wood chips," reports Motherboard. "Thermophilic or heat-loving microbes then metabolize the remains, maintaining an internal temperature of 131 degrees Fahrenheit within the vessel. The entire ritual takes one month, and produces a cubic yard of compost, according to Recompose." Non-organic materials such as artificial hips will be screened for and recycled, and people will certain illnesses may be ineligible since some pathogens may be resistant to the composting process.
Disgusting (Score:2, Funny)
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I'm trying to imagine what kind of sicko would go to a human composting site just to sniff the compost... Those people need to be stopped!
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It would smell like soil.
Other then a few microorganisms most life is build on the death of other.
Even plants needs soil to grow in that is from decayed plant and animal matter. Some plants such as the Venus fly trap need to catch insects because they don't have enough nutrients in its natural soil.
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They do if they're properly composted.
There's a huge difference between composting and just throwing stuff in a pile to rot as it likes.
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Even when thrown into a pile to rot as it likes, the rot will eventually stop and it will become soil. No one goes into the forests to be sure all the dead animals end up composted. A lot gets recycled (eaten by insects, scavengers, etc) but a fraction just rots. Although since rot is about being eaten by bacteria, it's all about being eaten by something anyway.
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It's painfully obvious you haven't spent much time in the forest. Things smell bad when they first die. Later, when they're a pile of bones on the forest floor, they just smell like the forest floor.
You fail to comprehend that the soil is already the remains of the humans, deer, bear, fish that you speak of.
Even some mushrooms smell bad during the first stage of decomposition. Ginko trees smell bad in the fall when the fruit is rotting on the ground, but the soil smells fine in the spring.
Even in the garden
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Composted matter smells like dirt. It is dirt.
It's all wormfood and they didn't seem to mind the birds, rodents and small marsupials I put in the compost bin. Any odor is getting the balance right in terms of other compostable material such as prunings, manure, grass clippings and vegetable scraps.
Burying someone 6 feet under in a box merely slows decomposition. OTOH, this method accelerates the process and if they provide an optimal mix of 'tinder', I wouldn't expect a scent.
The only concern is what they d
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My composting experience tells me that bad smells come from an excess of target material, and a dearth of "brown" material; which is a carbon source. Carbon is the main limiting nutrient for the desired decomposition. When there is not enough carbon for the bacteria, then yeasts end up doing more of the work; resulting in a horrid poop-like smell caused by fermentation.
In a garden it is hard to get enough carbon in just using yard waste; you need a giant pile of tree leaves that have been left out to age in
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Clueless (Score:2, Interesting)
Could you imagine what soil that contains dead mammals would smell like?
Don't have to. Step outside and take a sniff of the nearest patch of dirt. Smell that? That's soil containing dead mammals. Now that wasn't so scary was it?
As usual it's not clear if you are an idiot or a troll or some novel combination of both.
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This is /.
Do you really expect us to leave mom's basement?
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OK, but that brown stuff that falls in through the crack in the foundation, by the stairwell? That's dirt. It is made of dead from a few hundred millions of years of dead bodies.
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Another wooooosh.
Say something stupid. Get a massive smackdown delivered. Claim it's a "whoosh".
Sure thing buddy. We do all believe you.
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According to the Christian holy book they will lay sleeping in the soil until Jesus floats down from the sky, then they'll wake up and come back out and go to Heaven.
Nobody went to Heaven yet unless they got some sort of special pass; it is just a bunch of angels up there. The humans who were good enough are merely queued to be included later.
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Why do you keep whooshing yourself? We already know you didn't understand the replies.
News flash: your personal internal funnies are not other people whooshing. It just looks that way to you because you haven't discovered Identity [wikipedia.org] and you don't realize that the listener isn't constrained to the internal thinking of the speaker.
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When I was a kid, I would eat it by the handful. Yummy!
Also, take a drink of water; also known as diluted fish piss.
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Yes, I could. It's easy. Just think of the last time you saw a bloated deer on the side of the highway during the summer. They get hit quite a bit in suburbs that are expanding into rural areas.
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"Yes, I could. It's easy. Just think of the last time you saw a bloated deer on the side of the highway during the summer. "
I prefer to live in a place where cadavers get removed from the streets.
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There's a kind of research institution called a "body farm", where scientific investigations take place on what happens to human bodies when they're disposed of in various ways (e.g. left in a locked car trunk, dismembered and left in plastic bags, piled in mass graves, or simply left out on the forest floor). The primary purpose of these laboratories is to make forensic evaluations of remains more accurate.
There are a half dozen such institutions in the US alone; apparently they're quite horrible to the u
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From reading the comments here, it looks like most people failed to get your reference. Good job.
Re: Disgusting (Score:5, Funny)
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"Soylent Green is the next step."
This is compost so it will be vegan soylent green.
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This - and classic burial is a composting method - as long as the bodies aren't embalmed and buried in simple wooden caskets.
Easier way to handle this... (Score:5, Insightful)
...we've already got landfills. Just toss the body into a landfill, and done!
That said, I'm not actually opposed to the idea. But I expect the lawsuits wrapped around the first case where the family can't agree on method of disposal will make this a very unpopular option....
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The problem is, you only dumped one body. Of COURSE the cops are gonna take notice.
Next time, what you need to do is dump a whole bunch of bodies and don’t try to cover them up. Then the cops will say “Oh, just cleaning day at Mob Headquarters” and go about their business.
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"This doesn't work, believe me I know. The cops will still find it no matter how much trash you pile on it."
It seems to have worked for Jimmy Hoffa.
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The cops will still find it no matter how much trash you pile on it.
It just seems that way because he was so bad at hiding from pickles.
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I'm sure there's already been tons of lawsuits where the family members can't agree on method of disposal. One family member might be advocating for cremation, another for burial, and a third wants the person taxidermied and propped up on a couch with a beer can in his hand. (Granted, that's weird cousin Eddie making that request. Nobody really listens to him.)
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Actually it was weird cousin Jeremy [wikipedia.org]. The did listen to him. In fact he even attended the meeting of the college council (listed as "present but not voting") in 1976, a mere 144 years after his death.
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That said, I'm not actually opposed to the idea. But I expect the lawsuits wrapped around the first case where the family can't agree on method of disposal will make this a very unpopular option....
I agree with you completely. Burial is traditional for Jews and Christians, such that cremation--a traditionally pagan practice--was not permitted by the Catholic Church for a long time. Burial in this case has little to do with fertilizing the ground and everything to do with the dignity of the human body, which we believe Christ will raise again at his second coming. Cremation does not frustrate the resurrection; St. Monica said something to the effect of, "God will not lose track of my corpse." But crema
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But cremation does not adequately celebrate the eternal dignity of the body, which is not a mere disposable hunk of matter.
Leave it to the religiously indoctrinated to insist that your remains be locked in an overly expensive box, dumped into a pit, and then left as sustenance for the lowest order of microorganisms and bacteria, on the basis of that being considered a preservation of human dignity.
Of course one could spend hours trying to parse the sanctimonious word salad that's foisted as a excuse, or one could simply realize that the Church runs the graveyard and can extract tolls on the dead. Profiteering is what this do
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I expect the lawsuits wrapped around the first case where the family can't agree on method of disposal will make this a very unpopular option....
That's daft.
The courts decide who makes the decision based on existing rules; it has nothing at all to do with which decision which person wants to make. The court will decide who gets to choose, and that person will choose. They won't even be talking about that "Person A wants foo and Person B wants bar," they'll be talking about, "Person A wants to dispose of the body according to their religious tradition, and Person B wants to dispose of the body according to the wishes of the deceased." The only time t
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the process itself shouldn't be any more encumbered legally than any other means of disposing a body.
TFS gives one reason why this isn't legal in most places. Some pathogens survive the composting process. Since we're talking dead humans, whatever pathogens they had are known to survive in humans, so any pathogens which survive could make their way into our food supply. During cremation the body is heated high enough to kill any possible pathogens (this also results in dust / ash instead of soil).
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Re:Easier way to handle this... (Score:5, Insightful)
I fail to see a problem with this. My daughter keeps saying when I go she is going put my remains in a large garbage bag and leave me by the curb.
Joking aside, I've never understood the desire to pump dead people full of chemicals so the don't decay, then dump them in a hole in a air tight box. What is the point. An all that space taken up by graveyards. I've made it clear that I'm to be cremated and my ashes used to line the cat box. Might as well get one more use out of my dead ass.
Re:Easier way to handle this... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a way of respecting the dead. Not that the dead care, since they are dead, but it is one of the few things we as the living can do to feel like we are helping them.
I still want to upgrade the headstone on my wife's grave to something that stands out to honor her. That said, she doesn't care and the money would be better spent doing a donation in her name or something similar to that.
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I understand. I'm looking at it from my point of view, that of being dead. Not the point of view from losing a loved one. I should have thought of that.
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Embalming is a HORRIFIC process that was created before the advent of refrigeration and began to be widely used in the USA after the civil war due to the army's use of the process to send war dead home. It's continued use today is an abomination. Getting your corpse embalmed and put in an airtight casket pretty much guarantees that in a thousand years someone is going to dig up your remains and put them in a museum.
Like other posters in this thread, I've made my demand that I be cremated to dust known to my
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Was there anything special about your fucking wife? I do know that there was something special about fucking your wife.
Ricky, is that you? Quite frankly she was special to him and that is good enough for you. Fucking asshole.
Doesn't go far enough (Score:5, Funny)
We need to be able to vote on the living that need to be added to the mix!
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Really? Composting reactors? (Score:5, Funny)
Why not just find a hill, dig a hole, throw the person in upside down and plant a tree in their arsehole? We need more trees anyway.
That's a better use of land (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it would be great if we could replace cemeteries with forests. For each body, a small hole is dug, the recomposed soil is placed in it, along with a tree. Then a simple stone indicator is placed in the ground instead of a giant ego-tombstone. Instead of a family mausoleum, you have a family grove.
Maybe the family can choose the type of tree, or if that doesn't work for forest planning, you have a pine cemetery and an oak cemetery, etc. These could also be functional parks and rec sites instead of giant repositories of the dead that people rarely visit.
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I like that idea a lot actually.
The reason its probably not done thought is because people have to place narratives on everything that happens. The first time someones tree dies prematurely from disease, gets struck by lightning, etc people will imagine it was some judgement on the deceased.
The other issue with your family grove approach is if you great great grandfathers 100 year old oak with its massive root system goes over in a gale it might uproot your recently buried self...
These are not unsolvable p
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I like that idea a lot actually.
The reason its probably not done thought is because people have to place narratives on everything that happens. The first time someones tree dies prematurely from disease, gets struck by lightning, etc people will imagine it was some judgement on the deceased.
Interesting things or coincidences do happen in cemeteries. I have one of my own. A year or so ago I went for the first time to visit the grave of my great aunt who had recently passed. We had a rough idea of where it was but didn't know for sure. As my wife and I were in the car talking and trying to look for it, we see a flower display on a grave fall over (all of the graves had fake flower displays on them in holders, stuck in that green foam). So we go over and sure enough, her grave was next to th
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The last time I looked for a grave I've never visited before nothing special happened. No strange flowers falling over, no bird sitting sitting on the tombstone, no single ray of light from an overcast sky illuminating it. If there weren't a coincidence that day you wouldn't remember that visit as something special and wouldn't write about it online.
No, but I would still remember it due to the circumstances of me missing the funeral in the first place.
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"I like that idea a lot actually.
The reason its probably not done t"
It has been going on for a longtime already.
https://www.voanews.com/a/fore... [voanews.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Pretty much every funeral process is already rooted in superstition, I don't see how extending that further is necessarily a bad thing.
And we could avoid the uprooted remains issue if we stuck with the composting - just pour all of the grandma's compost together into the same "grave/garden plot", with her sapling planted in the center.
Of course, not all saplings would survive, but maybe not all the deceased feel the need for a prominent memorial. Or maybe they just didn't like your choice of tree. Pick a s
Not necessarily (Score:2)
They're not excluding people because of heavy metal content in their bodies (so hello pollutants), and you need to space most of the tree species you're talking about a bit farther apart than you do graves in a graveyard if you want to make sure there's space for when (and it's so definitely a 'when') you need to go in and care for the trees. Though the second may not be a problem...because you may not be able to properly care for the trees because it causes people to go and protest for woo reasons. Your
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This tree burial pod [cnn.com] is kinda cool.
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Obligitory (Score:5, Funny)
"Bring out yer deaaaaaaad!"
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"Bring out yer deaaaaaaad!"
"I'm feeling much better!"
Washington Could Be the 1st State To Bury the Dead (Score:2)
Which is among the reasons humans have been doing that since very long time now.
Until the craze for cremating dead bodies.
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It ended a long time before that, with the popularization of embalming, long-lasting caskets, and burial vaults. We do everything we can to make sure that our dead *don't* return to the Earth.
Waterworld (Score:2)
Bones to berries
Veins to vine
These tendons to trees
This blood to brine
Too old she was
This woman does leave us,
recycled and enshrined
in the presence
of Him who leads us
Classic old joke. (Score:3)
High society lady to the pianist, "That piece was excellent, very nice. Wondering who composed it"
Pianist, "Vivaldi madame, Four Seasons".
Lady: "Good, is he still composing?"
Pianist: "No madame, he is decomposing."
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A thief breaks into the crypt of Beethoven, and is surprised to see an undead Beethoven moving about and tearing up sheet music. He cries out "Beethoven, what are you doing?". The corpse answers "I'm decomposing."
recomposting is better than existing methods (Score:2)
Can that be step 2 for me? (Score:2)
good (Score:2)
pathogens (Score:2)
131 F seems like it would leave a lot of pathogens alive, but I wonder which ones are on their "no go" list? This could be a great way for non-cannibals to get to have the experience of Kuru.
Also curious: I know that human *waste* can't be used as fertilizer for "certified organic" foods, but what about actual humans?
We all know this is how it begins (Score:2)
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Re:Score! (Score:4, Funny)
Finally (Score:5, Funny)
After I die I might finally be useful at gardening.
Uh, What About the Bones? (Score:2)
This sounds great, but you're still going to have the bones. No one month process will decompose bone material. So, does someone fish out the bones from the nice warm and I bet great smelling compost? Or do we just sift out the dirt and count out the skulls and rib cages? Do you still have to cremate the bones?
I just can't imagine what it would be like to work at a place like this. It would take a special someone.
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This sounds great, but you're still going to have the bones. No one month process will decompose bone material.
Here's an exmple of a municipal composting thing:
https://www.southwark.gov.uk/b... [southwark.gov.uk]
It's shredded, composted one way for a week the nanother way for 6 more weeks and then sieved.
They accept animal bones in with the compostable waste. Oce the binmen have wheeled the bins to the dustbin lorries everything else is handled by machines. No one actually picks through the half-composted waste for bones.
and
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Somehow the idea of putting a loved one into a blender (shredding?)
Will they blend? That is the question.
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Bones compost just fine; obviously, at a slower rate. Properly composted it only takes about a month to get rid of chicken bones-- probably faster if optimized. The process produces heat which has to be kept below a certain temp or the bacteria die. Oxygen is needed as well because anaerobic bacteria do not do the job well enough.
Think about how many creatures with bones have died and how few bones we dig up... fossils are only mineralized bones; hardly any bones relative amount of natural death exist. SOM
Landfills are a better idea (Score:2)
Modern landfills circulate enzymes through the waste so that organic material breaks down into methane, which is then used to fire a small power plant. A better use would be to dump a body into a vat of the stuff. A portion of the gas could be diverted to a gas lamp, with a nice funeral where the bereaved get to observe that the light of the deceased continues to shine (with the remainder of the gas being diverted to power an electric plant, just like the landfills).
Previously on Slashdot (Score:2)
Previously on Slashdot:
Urban Death Project Aims To Rebuild Our Soil By Composting Corpses - Slashdot [slashdot.org]
(The process described is somewhat different - the one proposed here could be an improvement)
The way we do thins now isn't that old. (Score:2)
We put corpses in a metal casket, put that in a concrete sarcophagus, and then cover that with material in the expectation that the remains will stay there, on their own, until the end of time. Until fairly recently, you'd have to be a pharaoh to get that kind of treatment.
In most pre-modern cities there was an institution called "the charnel house". They'd bury you in the graveyard for a couple of years to get your bones cleaned up, then after a few years they'd dig them up. If you were an abbot or othe
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It's not hard to draw a connection from that to the details of vampire legend.
Doesn't much of the vampire legend stem from the results of decomposition? Something strange happens in the village or people start getting sick, so they think it's from someone recently dead. They go to exhume them and due to the effects of decomposition it looks like their hair/fingernails grew (just skin tightening) or blood is coming from their mouth (gases in the body cavity forcing decomposing flesh and fluids through a convenient opening). So to be safe they cut off the head and stake them down in
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Yep. Body parts work their way to the surface, which is still a familiar pop-culture image. Almost always there are reports of small holes through which the revenant supposedly magically issues, but which are very likely animal burrows.
So you call the local priest, who is probably one of the few people who can read but has no more understanding of anatomy, microbiology or forensics than you do. He has you dig up the grave and gee, the corpse doesn't look rotted, but it sure looks weird. Worse yet, it ma
I thought that was what cemeteries are for (Score:2)
You stick people in the ground for the funeral, dig them back up to reclaim the casket and let them rot in the ground.
Paying for things that have always been free (Score:2)
...and the downward spiral pattern continues.
It used to be free to bury your loved one.
You'd grab a shovel, and walk into the forest.
You'd re-plant a nearby sapling, and watch it grow strong.
Now, you purchase a plot decades before,
and pay for it while they're still alive, plus tax
then pay for a ceremony, and for the burial itself, plus tax
then pay for the maintenance of the grave, plus tax
but still, the composting was provided, free-of-charge, by mother nature, sans tax
And in the future, with this great tec
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George Carlin would be happy (Score:2)
CEMETARIES!!! There's another idea whose time has passed! Saving all the dead people up for one part of town?! What the hell kind of a medieval, superstitious, religious, bullshit idea is that?! Plough these motherfuckers up, plough into the streams and rivers of America; we need that phosphorous for farming! If we're going to recycle, LET'S GET SERIOUS!!!
George Carlin, 1992. [scrapsfromtheloft.com]
Grind me up and feed me to the pigs or chickens... (Score:2)
...though make sure I'm dead first.
It's probably a more environmentally friendly. Though amalgam, gold and titanium may want to be removed first though.
Or whole-body donation... (Score:2)
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Composting is not cooking (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure that 131 degrees Fahrenheit is not hot enough to kill the wee beasties found in a human body.
Doesn't have to. That's not how composting works [livescience.com]. You are thinking in terms of cooking which is not what is going on. Composting relies on various thermophilic organisms to consume the decaying matter and they generate heat as a by-product. In fact it doesn't work if it gets too hot and kills the microorganisms. That heat is what is generated by them doing their work. When they have digested the matter the compost cools down again.
We don't use human feces as fertilizer for much the same reasons
No the reason we don't use human feces as fertilizer is something quite different. Compost is quite safe to use and carries no meaningful risk of transmission of harmful pathogens. It's a completely different process with completely different risk profiles.
Re:Composting is not cooking (Score:5, Informative)
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We don't use human feces as fertilizer for much the same reasons
No the reason we don't use human feces as fertilizer is something quite different. Compost is quite safe to use and carries no meaningful risk of transmission of harmful pathogens. It's a completely different process with completely different risk profiles.
Except this is in part because of practicing good judgement when choosing what to compost, and meat is not typically considered safe to compost while feces (even human feces) can be composted safely. Some things you're best off burning and composting t
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Almost every antibiotic that's been created was created from lifeforms found in soil or decaying matter. These antibiotics are natural defenses these soil bacteria and fungi use to defend themselves from animal pathogens. In the process of composting a human body these soil micro-organisms would consume the organic matter including these pathogens. This is the natural life cycle of things.
The exception might be viruses with long life's but the simple solution to that is the same used for treated human waste
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Why would the microorganisms in the human body be worse than the microorganisms in rats, deer, insects, etc?
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Nanny state overstepping its authority. Claiming it is the sole decider of all things legal and illegal. If an action does not aggress against another, than it is legal.
There's the key. Improperly disposing of bodies IS currently illegal- thus the need to pass a law to make this legal (or rather, be another defined proper way to dispose of a body).
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Nanny state overstepping its authority. Claiming it is the sole decider of all things legal and illegal. If an action does not aggress against another, than it is legal.
There's the key. Improperly disposing of bodies IS currently illegal- thus the need to pass a law to make this legal (or rather, be another defined proper way to dispose of a body).
Let's step it back a little more to cover why improperly disposing of bodies is illegal: Corpses are biohazards, especially once they've started leaking. Proper disposal of a corpse involves both make sure the corpse won't be accidentally mistaken for a murder victim and wasting resource/needlessly increasing stress levels that way, and making sure that it won't be spreading disease. How effective that is can vary, and bad burial practices have significant death tolls.
However, nothing says that you can't
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"outside the box. And this is out there. And it makes sense because recycling is smart and reverent. I'll be recommending several friends for this program, immediately."
It is actually literally out of the box.
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Having the corpse on display in your family room for a week or two was common practice for a very long time, and there was no medical reason to stop - it was just a cultural shift.
Proper composting pretty much eliminates the toxins and infection risk, which are products of the way in which a body decomposes. The composting microbes quickly devour the corpse leaving nothing for any human pathogens to survive in. In fact, they mostly devour the struggling human pathogens as well - microbial warfare happens
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Composting kills most of the pathogens, you've dumped them the soil microbes optimal, much-hotter turf, and they just can't compete. Some pathogens are especially hardy, but the vast majority die pretty quickly outside the human body, even without a thriving community of soil microbes trying to eat them.
You might still want to avoid growing food in it, just to be extra safe. But so long as you properly compost it first even human manure is really unlikely to cause any problems (properly being the key term)