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Washington Could Become the First State To Compost the Dead (nbcnews.com)
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.
Could you imagine what soil that contains dead mammals would smell like? This needs to be stopped.
...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....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
"Genius" Startup Proposes Unlikely And Unpalatable Idea.
Yet Another Granola Munching Startup Destined To Fail!
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.
Disolving bodies in lye has become a not so rare practice across the USA.
New in mortuary science: Dissolving bodies with lye
We need to be able to vote on the living that need to be added to the mix!
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
I would be against it as it needlessly increases risk of passing some parasites similar to using human feces as fertilizer. If we keep those decomposed bodies with potential parasite eggs in some cemetery park I don't really care (its basically same as normal burial), but some of it would be used for planting food for sure ("he would want to be useful" etc). I expect the risk is not to big as most of the eggs would just decompose along the body, but still its unnecessary.
...to go in to the tanks, and become one with all the people.
- Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, "Ethics for Tomorrow"
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.
"Soylent Green is people!"
"Bring out yer deaaaaaaad!"
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
And there are reasons why they are not randomly located. Decomposing human bodies are quite toxic and pose a serious infection risk. There is also a taboo against using human feces as fertilizer. Intentionally not closing the cycle prevents certain pathogens from spreading. Dealing with corpses is serious business and a carelessly naive attitude causes significant health hazards. This is not worth it. You have to tell the hippies "no" sometimes.
Which is among the reasons humans have been doing that since very long time now.
Until the craze for cremating dead bodies.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Ah, just like mob burials...of course the wood chucker will do the "composting" quicker. The idea of mourners though was never practiced, after all it would violate the first rule. No witnesses.
"Bones to berries. Veins to vines. His tendons to trees. His blood to brine."
Now we're getting down and dirty.
"Some people will certain illnesses ..."
I see what you did there ...
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.
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
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."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Which is among the reasons humans have been doing that since very long time now.
Until the craze for cremating dead bodies.
And all the cultures that have been cremating their dead for thousands of years - like the Indians - are part of this recent craze?
Burying the dead is most about superstition and the after life nonsense. I mean, WTF do we embalm people?!
just think of all the cemeteries with graves, not only is it taking up real-estate that could be better used for the living, each and every grave has about a gallon of formaldehyde that is slowly seeping in to the ground and contaminated the groundwater (YUCK!)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I'd really like to start with a sky burial. Whatever is left they can certainly compost.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I like being warm so compost me.
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. 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.
In lieu of this being an option, burial at sea also return your nutrients to the environment, and would be my second choice.
Wouldn't this be a bad idea and spread disease? I know that you aren't supposed to use human waste as fertilizer (vs. dung from other animals) for this reason.
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?
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
Why not?
There's a clear reference to a twilight zone episode methinks.
YMMV
captcha : softball
1 human skull is a monetary unit. Limited supply, scales with the growth of humanity, can't be spoofed. E-transactions could use the DNA sequence of the skull.
Sure people would be killed over it, but they are already killed for money.
And it ends with someone shouting "Soylent Green is people!"
Because this is how you get the zombie apocalypse.
I've always wanted to be used as compost after death. No joking. It seems selfish to lock up the nutrients I'm no longer using, or destroying them in fire.
Washington DC and the white house
The way we bury our dead, the ones that are embalmed is terrible. They put formaldehyde and other chemicals that are not only toxic, they're cancer causing. So virtually every grave out there is a toxic waste dump. We use some huge number of gallons of the stuff every year. All to preserve the body? It WILL liquefy either way. You can't stop the decomposition process.
We also shouldn't be incinerating people any more. There's a alkaline process whereby they put a body in a vessel and heat it up for a few hours. What is left are bones, amino acids and peptides. That can go down a sanitary sewer for processing.
So we really should be more responsible. Not create little toxic waste dumps all over the place and not incinerate any more. Use the alkaline process or bury without embalming. Why in the world do we need to preserve the body anyhow? It's not like we could use it later. Once you're dead and especially with that very toxic stuff in you, you're dead.
After I die I might finally be useful at gardening.
/* No Comment */
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.
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 normal cemetery trees do get tended to because while people may have superstitions about these trees, nobody wants it falling over. That's especially true once the tree is old enough that it's really quite likely that it'll drag up skeletons, from before caskets were functionally time capsules for corpses.
Also, we already have had problems with good forestry practices from people practicing various flavors of Green woo, including pseudoscientific flavors of it. It'll be even more of a problem if the forest doubles as their graveyard, especially if they're planting trees that close together. It's going to be a burning dumpster full of tires.
It doesn't help that they're almost certainly not going to be functional parks and rec sites any more than modern cemeteries and quite a few people already find forests creepy anyway. I've seen quite a few people visiting old cemeteries--even one or two which are still accepting new burials--but the new ones are often pretty cold places that tend to be full of utter strangers, and a lot of the local ones you have to get somebody to let you into the graveyard in the first place and good luck there. (Seriously, it's a locked gate you need somebody on-site to unlock for you, and most of the time the only somebodies there are the dead...)
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).
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Previously on Slashdot:
Urban Death Project Aims To Rebuild Our Soil By Composting Corpses - Slashdot
(The process described is somewhat different - the one proposed here could be an improvement)
In the long run we are all dead. - John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946)
This was done on an industrial scale about 70 years ago already.
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 other notable they'd go into a box called an ossuary and put in a place of honor in a church. If you were a saint, your bones be divvied up and put into the relic trade. But if you were an ordinary person what was left of you got chucked into a vault called a "charnel house", probably sorted by part for efficient packing: skulls here, femurs there. Some of the more artistic charnel houses (also called "ossuaries") are now tourist attractions.
In effect the graveyard was used to compost the soft tissues, rendering the bones clean, compact, and safe to handle.
Now the situation was different in small towns and rural communities. I have a couple of friends who are successful urban fantasy authors, so I've got interested in the folkloric origins of the vampire and werewolf tropes. Revenant legends were common in medieval times up well into the 20th Century, but they don't occur in large well-organized cities, and the individual involved (Dracula tropes notwithstanding) are never high status individuals. They were always poor rural villagers or remote farmstead occupants. There's not a lot of direct documentary evidence on burial practices for this class, but evidently they were simply wrapped in a shroud and buried in shallow graves. I times of stress, like during epidemics, the grave would be *very* shallow.
It's not hard to draw a connection from that to the details of vampire legend.
Anyhow, throughout most of human history, almost everybody has been composted in some way. We've just never made a conscious effort to do anything specific with the nutrients in the human remains; we just let them filter into the ecosystem.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
in your Granny!
You stick people in the ground for the funeral, dig them back up to reclaim the casket and let them rot in the ground.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
...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 technology,
you're going to get to pay for the microbes, plus tax
and for the composting time, plus tax
this is the usual kind of technological progress -- the progress of technology being able to gouge people for profit.
I'm so sorry, I forgot that you had to purchase the shovel, plus tax. Let's go one step further back: you'd float them out into the lake, on a "raft", and light them on fire.
bonus lesson: the only sure things in like are death and taxes. I had always assumed that taxes weren't also levied after death. My mistake I guess.
So tell me why it's illegal for me to bury my loved one under the tree in my backyard? I don't need fast-acting microbes. I have a few giant trees and a vegetable garden.
Not to get too morbid here, and this is certainly going to be border-line, but if my loved-one was killed when a tree branch snapped and fell, well, I think if my tree killed them, my tree should get to eat them. Isn't that only fair?
But really, this all comes down to peeing on a road trip. I get to wait another fifty miles for a bathroom, as I drive past thousands of square miles of forest wherein millions of animals pee constantly.
https://subslikescript.com/mov... Hey, here's another place we could put some low cost housing, cemeteries. There's another idea whose time has passed. Saving all the dead people in one part of town? What the hell kind of a superstitious, religious, medieval bullshit idea is that? Plow these motherfuckers up. Plow them into the streams and rivers of America. We need that phosphorous for farming. If we're going to recycle, let's get serious.
My sons and I were brainstorming buisnes ideas. My youngest son had an awesome idea, Viking Funerals. He said I he didn't want to be buried in the ground, or cremated.. but the idea of floating out to see on a wooden raft and set on fire... Cool!
I live in New England, on the coast. I wonder if it's possible to start a busines like this. It's a cool idea. When I expire I'd like to go out this way!
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.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
...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.
I would request that my body, in death, be buried, not cremated—so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it...just as I have dined on flora and fauna throughout my life.
- Kneel in de Grass Tyson
I'm a big fan of minimizing the cost of death on families/loved ones. That people are expected to shell out thousands of dollars in response to someone dying so they can take up room under ground, in a mausoleum, or on someone's shelf seems ineffectual to me. I like the idea of full-body donation like ScienceCare: Upon acceptance, Science Care covers all costs of donation, including cremation, transportation, and filing of the death certificate. Tissue not recovered for research and education is cremated and returned in 3-5 weeks. If you also want to be an organ transplant donor, click here for details.
"Upon acceptance, Science Care covers all costs of donation, including cremation, transportation, and filing of the death certificate. Tissue not recovered for research and education is cremated and returned in 3-5 weeks. If you also want to be an organ transplant donor, click here for details."
As someone who just wants to be useful to others, I can't find a more honorable way to be discarded. If someone wants to memorialize me, stick a plaque on a bench.
Darn, at first I read too fast and was thinking they meant Washington DC. I had some suggestions on where to start.
Damned Lefty Hippies ... feed the dead to the unemployed -- that's the Right answer!
Organic soylent green is better.
It's all eukaryotic cells. Be it plant or animal.
Animals simply taste better.
...in a Glad Bag
But Send me to Glory in a glad bag.
Don't waste a fancy coffin on my bones.
Just put me out on the curb next Tuesday
Let the city sanitation bear me home.
copyright 1979 by Don & Mim Carlson, Steve Mason
Blue River Valley Publishing Co. (BMI)
https://mudcat.org/@displaysong.cfm?SongID=5231
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgXzXchYP54
NT
Intellectually I can understand composting, nutrient cycles and all that. Emotionally though, I don't want to think about it. And it would be so much worse knowing, "hey, this potted plant contains Grandma!"
No, I don't need that.
Doesn't require as much energy as cremation and also doesn't release as much carbon dioxide, either. The bones also become brittle and easily crushed to be disposed along with the resulting fluid.
What's not to like? Other than perhaps the mere concept of your remains being flushed and mixed in with ordinary sewer waste. But hey at least you're being eco friendly even on the way down!
Personally, my preference is a little bit of coal-rolling at the very end. Ideally with hookers, and blackjack.
âoeI hate my brother!â âoeYouâ(TM)ll eat what we put in front of you, and youâ(TM)ll like it.â
Or must only obsolete measures be used for this new technique?