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Urban Death Project Aims To Rebuild Our Soil By Composting Corpses (inhabitat.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Urban Death Project utilizes the process of composting to safely and gently turn our deceased into soil-building material, creating a meaningful, equitable and ecological urban alternative to existing options for the disposition of the dead," said Katrina Spade, a designer based in Seattle. "The project is a solution to the overcrowding of city cemeteries, a sustainable method of disposing of our dead, and a new ritual for laying our loved ones to rest."
Sky burial has been practiced in Tibet for millennia.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I already did my part. This is exactly how I disposed of my mother-in-law's corpse.
Why do you care what happens to your body after you die? You will be log gone by then.
isn't that a good name for a band?
Soylent Brown
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
And mix the ashes with a tad of soil and use that to plant a tree in a vase, when the tree grows a little, transplant it to ground.
But DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES compost me!
PS: In reality, my ashes will be thrown at sea. BUT DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES compost me!
Cannot imagine whay that would bother you. Composting will certainly give back to the earth and to future generations.
I have to note that I wanted cremated and flushed down the toilet at either a stripper bar or McDonald's. But this could be interesting. I'm envisioning my corpse being fed to one of those instant grinders like they use for rooster chicks (since only the hens lay eggs, and it's about a 50:50 mix at birth, so you do the math - then turning me into a nice compost for flowers or veggies.
Would vegans refuse to eat veggies grown from human content compost?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Dead bodies are buried under the cherry trees. -- Motojirou Kajii.
I imagine a field where they recycle our flesh filled with bright red cherry trees in full bloom.
The person in charge of me and my stuff when I'm gone knows 1 thing: as long as I'm dead I don't care what you do with me. Cremate me, bury me, donate me to science, chop me in pieces and toss me in the trash, I don't care. Just make sure I'm dead first.
I was looking into the same thing a couple years ago and came to the same conclusion. It ain't easy. Even in states where it is legal, there are few choices. If I recall correctly, I found two locations in my state where a natural burial is possible, tho I may have extended my search to neighboring states. They still require a container because reasons but at least it can be biodegradable.
Just use a wood chipper to take care of the problem. I know it works cause I saw it on TV.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Most of them are currently breathing. I think this way they would be much more useful.
Why is Snark Required?
Would vegans refuse to eat veggies grown from human content compost?
Just tell them it's soylent green.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I read the headline as:
"Urban Death Project Aims To Rebuild Our Soil By Composting Congress"
And thought, "What an amazingly good idea!"
I'd rather be cremated. Don't waste any valuable land on my remains, and if you can make use of the heat from my burning corpse feel free.
Oooh, sorry, cremation is external application of heat, typically burning propane, but in some cases you can use oil or wood.
The combustion of your body is minimal.
Would vegans refuse to eat veggies grown from human content compost?
Just tell them it's soylent green.
But I gave up soy for Lent.
Ugh..I apologize, I've wanted to uses that combination of words forever.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I mean, whatever you and your family want to do with your body is fine with me, but this is just idiotic from an environmental perspective. The environmental value of your body's chemical components is totally negligible compared to what you consume over your lifetime. I mean, I eat my weight's worth of food in a few months, so returning my body's nitrogen to the farmland is almost worthless. My share of fossil fuel burning is about 17 tonnes of carbon per year, so cremating the couple of kilograms of carbon I contain makes no difference.
The only real environmental problem with burial is that it ties up valuable urban land in a cemetery forever. Which is definitely an issue, but it's easy to solve: just get yourself cremated. This composting thing is expensive, unsafe, and a waste of time.
Yes, dirt is unsanitary. In fact, decomposing biological material is one of the key things that makes dirt useful.
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"You tell everybody. Listen to me, Hatcher. You've gotta tell them! Soylent Green is people! We've gotta stop them somehow!"
in cemetery - happy trees there.
With this project though - the fact how bones are handled is totally left out. They sure won't compose any time soon.
For composting, skull needs to be cracked open, bones ground up and soft body parts chopped into small pieces, like 2" dia, otherwise no composting, gets into stinky anaerobic process. A body, maybe 180 lbs > 60 % water, very challenging to compost, needs tons of carbon (wood) to compensate.
In recycling organic waste, let's say from restaurants or supermarkets, the major problem to get this material composted is to offset the water content with wood.
If reality kicks in with composting human bodies and gets public, people will be getting upset.
Looks like a very loony project - scamming airheads.
I'm not sure. Consider the nature of reincarnation. I don't know where I'm going with this.
Usually, I say I want to be cremated because I don't trust the living to respect my body, since I have body parts of both genders. I always imagine they'd do something more fucked up to it than they already have, just to make a good looking young man in that coffin. So, I want it burned in the event that a Matheson "What Dreams May Come" afterlife is the true fate of souls. Then I can lol as I watch the monstrosity that isn't me burn before I go into the light.
However, if somebody could guaranteed that this body would be added to a composting heap undisturbed, to let microorganisms break down its proteins, then perhaps that compost could be laid somewhere and maybe somebody would plant wildflowers (or some kind of flowers at least) in it. Then its proteins and other molecules could be repurposed as a flower garden. I wouldn't mind that, even in a Matheson "What Dreams May Come" scenario.
But yeah, ultimately, I cannot trust humans to respect my body parts. Burn it, I say. Less to hang on to after death. I guess it's vanity in the end. Vanity ties us to this existence.
In an empirical sense, yes, funerals are for the living. I'm just worried all this mysticism shit might not be made up. Funerals could be for the dead as well.
Medication is a huge issue when it comes to human waste. Lots and lots and lots of the drugs we take pass nasty by products into our waste that aren't easily removed. So one of the challenges around waste treatment plants is the disposal of the solid/sludge component. It isn't something that you could use as fertilizer without health impacts.
This is something like what my wife and I have planned.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Because the idea of someone tending and revering the rotting meat sack like it's a sacred artifact is kinds of creepy.
Hard to imagine that you'd intentionally rot something is treating it as a sacred artifact. The crap in that article about teh loving family wrapping the sorpse in linen is just some goofy crap about people that might find it off-putting.
There isn't anything at all unnatural about the decomposition process.
Would vegans refuse to eat veggies grown from human content compost?
I sure would (OK, I'm a vegetarian), for the same reason
So how do you keep animal corpse byproducts out of the food you eat? Or do you just eat hydroponically grown veggies?
I don't agree with using human waste as compost ...
That's good, because it isn't compost. You might use it as a fertilizer for it. But compost is broken down organic products, not manure. Manure might be added to compost.
humans are dirty, carry plenty of disease, and a modern human is mostly processed crap.
No more so than any other flesh based component of compost. By the time it has been broken down it isn't a human, or any other animal.
Which means I assume there's a lot of pathogens and other things which would come into play which we haven't yet established as safe ... Hep C and decades of pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, McDonald's, KFC, Viagra, and whatever other crap we dump into our bodies come to mind.
Have you ever tried Breatharianism? Migh tjust be about pure enough.
I seriously doubt humans are fit for consumption by anything, let alone humans.
Hell, the animals we grow for the purpose of eating aren't fit to eat in my opinion; the nasty disgusting carcass of a modern human? The mind reels at just how nasty that must be.
Really, would you eat medical waste? Because that's what you're talking about.
Okay, I thought I had a rather cynical view of humanity, but your hatred of the species is nothing I could ever aspire to. Gopod luck with that.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Here's a thought - put the corpses through an industrial grinder to reduce them to slop, then dispose of the slop way out in the ocean.
Result? A reduction of atmospheric CO2 from algal blooms. Win-win, I say.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
You know why we have E-coli outbreaks? Because animal waste and other garbage contaminates food.
You know why we have things like "mad cow disease"? Because some idiot decided grinding up sheep to feed to cows made sense -- despite that cows are herbivores and not evolved to ingest sheep.
My father made his own garden compost for a lot of years, and quite frankly meat caused more problems than it contributed ... because the meat rotted and got nasty and didn't break down into nice clean compost. That's why we historically slop pigs with it, because they do a better job of turning it into something useful -- meat. I won't eat it, but I do know why we've had pigs in agriculture for thousands of years.
You'll notice we don't use the term "manure" to include the shit from carnivores, and people don't generally eat carnivores ... because it develops a really nasty flavor due to concentrating everything else in the food chain.
Look around at your average person you see in Wal Mart. Overweight, loaded up with sodium and other nasty chemicals, fat, grease, oil, medicines -- prepared food and other garbage.
If someone put half of that shit into cows, you wouldn't eat that. Well, increasingly we do put that shit into cows, and people are discovering it's unhealthy and quite the opposite of good for you. In fact, it contributes to makes use overall more sick.
A human from an abstract agrarian culture? Well, there's an "ick" factor, but it isn't quite so loaded with the crap modern humans put in.
If our waterways are full of hormones and antibiotics because we put it into our bodies and excrete it out, you can't claim that a human is fit for eating.
You can go ahead and eat whatever you want. I don't give a shit. But you'll notice nobody is looking to use dog crap as manure, or eating wolves ... precisely because, unlike eating cows and other herbivores, they're mostly a concentration of garbage which doesn't add any value to compost.
I don't hate humans. But I look at modern humans as anything but what I'd call a clean food source ... because modern life fills us with chemicals and other garbage the FDA wouldn't let you put into cows,
I sure as fuck wouldn't eat something which I knew had humans as compost, and if I had my option, I wouldn't want something which had ground up cows or cats or monkeys as compost either. Precisely because I know damned well there are diseases which can spread from this.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Conversely, I do have a lot of electrolytes - it's what plants crave.
Actually, after something's been dead for a while, it tends to become rather inhospitable to the microbes that cause disease in living creatures. There's a few diseases that can survive the death of their host, but that tends to be the exception rather than the rule. And if you cook the corpse thoroughly at some point in the process then even those shouldn't be an issue.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
There are places that allow you to be buried in a pet cemetery. Cheaper.
My sister will green bury people along with their pets @ Eloise Woods.
Look up black soldier flies. They are common flies whose larvae are used for composting, and are very effective with all organics including meat wastes, usually much faster reduction than normal composting. The larvae themselves are protein rich and are great feed for chickens.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
As the book says, direct shit(human)-to-farm in a tight loop is a very bad idea on earth - bacteria and parasites that do well in (but not for) people are given an ideal transmission vector. An example disease is Amoebiasis (had it, not fun). It is very common in developing nations, where these kinds of farming practices are sometimes employed. But a composting toilet solves this. And good, modern ones can do so without any smells or unpleasantness.
I reckon Elon Musk/Tesla should do a composting toilet. It is the logical companion project to post-industrial-modernist home produced & stored electricity. The problem is, I guess, that Tesla's usual business model of capturing hearts and minds by going for the prestige end of the market first could be a bit tricky. Any ideas?
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
It would be cool if the algal blooms could form an image of the recently departed, when viewed form high above. Perhaps with a caption like: "I told you I was sick!"
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
It is not like there is shortage of land. If someone doesn't bother to have a decent sepulture for his/her relative to commemorate once a while, there is plenty of land unsuitable for useful purpose for this. Deserts, namely. The argument to not waste valuable land doesn't hold water. But hey, you do whatever you want with your remains as long as it doesn't become a threat to others. I just believe the argumentation is a load of bullshit, it is not like rebuilding soil from human corpses make a significant difference overall. There is already plenty of organic material available to rebuild soil, they even convert it into fuel instead. Maybe we could turn human corpses into diesel or gasoline?
Achille Talon
Hop!
"Environmentalism is the religion of choice for urban atheists" - Michael Crichton
How do you know?
Does it really matter? With or without an afterlife, once the brain is dead you are no longer in that body. Funerals and corps preserving are for the living, the dead are dead, and no longer care. I say let body decompose and return to the earth, just like every other living thing.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Yeah, it's really unsanitary. Think about it. Dirt. Also, growing food in that dirty stuff is terrible, and also animals eat stuff that grows in unsanitary dirt. I would recommend you stop eating. Also note, water runs through dirty dirt as well, so drinking is ill-adviced on that alone, but don't forget that all the water you consume will contain amounts of urine from birds, animals and probably humans. Finally, rotting corpses release a serious amount of nasty gases, they blend with the air, so breathing is also not recommended.
Just how much Arsenic is your typical person walking around with?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Humans, at the top of the food chain, do tend to concentrate heavy metals though. I think that is one argument against composting and using human waste for farming, along with the obvious pathogen concerns.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Those problems have been there since Victorian times. There used to be a dead train out of London, running from a dedicated [deadicated? - Ed] station. With, of course, separate classes so that the dead nobs wouldn't have to mix with the dead oiks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
When expanding highway 75, the main North/South artery that passes the downtown Dallas area around 1990, ground from an old forgotten cemetery was disturbed, and some of the construction workers were getting sick. Here is a few details of what they found. http://www.cemeteries-of-tx.co...
That this "idea" comes from Seattle should be one of your first clues that this is a bad idea.
I am fairly sure Toxic Dumping is against the law.
There are places that allow you to be buried in a pet cemetery [philly.com]. Cheaper.
I saw that movie. It doesn't turn out well.
Like this urge I have to sometime shout "Theater" in a crowded fire? I'm not likely to get the opportunity, and really don't want it, but if I'm ever in one....
Like I was at a big fight, and a Hockey game broke out.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.