Science Human compost funerals 'better for the environment' - FEED THE BUGS PEASANT.

Human compost funerals 'better for environment'

A US firm claims the service it offers saves more than a tonne of carbon, after a pilot study.

www.bbc.co.uk

A US firm has given scientific details of its "human composting" process for environmentally friendly funerals.

A pilot study on deceased volunteers showed that soft tissue broke down safely and completely within 30 days.

The firm, Recompose, claims that its process saves more than a tonne of carbon, compared to cremation or traditional burial.

It says that it will offer the world's first human composting service in Washington state from next February.

Speaking exclusively to BBC News, Recompose's chief executive and founder, Katrina Spade, said that concerns about climate change had been a big factor in so many people expressing interest in the service.

"So far 15,000 people have signed up to our newsletter. And the legislation to allow this in the state received bi-partisan support enabling it to pass the first time it was tabled," she said.

"The project has moved forward so quickly because of the urgency of climate change and the awareness we have to put it right."

Image copyrightRECOMPOSEImage captionRecompose boss Katrina Spade says her plan has proved so popular because of climate change
Ms Spade spoke to me as results of the scientific study into the composting process, which Recompose calls natural organic reduction, was being presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle.

"There is a loving practicability to it," she said, in one of the few interviews she has given since announcing details of the project a year ago.

She told me that she came up with the idea 13 years ago when she began to ponder her own mortality - at the ripe old age of 30!

"When I die, this planet, which has protected and supported me my whole life, shouldn't I give back what I have left?

"It is just logical and also beautiful."

• How do you compost a human body - and why?
• The rise of alternative funerals

Ms Spade draws a distinction between decomposing and recomposing. The former is what happens when a body is above ground. Recomposing involves integrating it with the soil.

She claims that natural organic reduction of a body prevents 1.4 tonnes of carbon being released into the atmosphere, compared with cremation. And she believes there is a similar saving compared to traditional burial when transportation and the construction of the casket is taken into account.

"For a lot of folks it resonates with the way they try to lead their lives. They want to pick a death care plan that resonates with the way they live."

The process involves laying the body in a closed vessel with woodchips, alfalfa and straw grass. The body is slowly rotated to allow microbes to break it down.

Image copyrightRECOMPOSE/MOLT STUDIOSImage captionAn artist's vision of a future human composting facility
Thirty days later the remains are available to relatives to scatter on plants or a tree.

Although the process is straightforward, it has taken four years of scientific research to perfect the technique. Ms Spade asked soil scientist Prof Lynne Carpenter Boggs to undertake the work.

Composting livestock is a well-established practice in Washington state. Prof Carpenter Boggs's task was to adapt it for human subjects and ensure that the remains were environmentally safe.

She carried out pilot studies with six volunteers who had given their enthusiastic consent to the research prior to their deaths. She told me that the work took an emotional toll on her and her team.

"We all kept checking in on each other. My physiology felt different, I wasn't sleeping well for a few nights, I wasn't hungry - it was a distress response."

Prof Carpenter-Boggs found that the recomposing body reached temperatures of 55C (131F) for a period of time.

"We are certain that there has been a destruction of the vast majority of [disease-causing organisms] and pharmaceuticals because of the high temperatures that we reached."

• Natural burial site in meadows approved

Recompose will begin business later this year. Anyone can participate but the process is legal only in Washington state. Legislation to allow natural organic reduction is currently being considered in Colorado. Ms Spade believes that it will be a matter of time before it is more widely available - in the US and elsewhere.

"We hope other states will pick up the idea once we get going in Washington. We have had lots of excitement from the UK and other parts of the world and we hope to open branches overseas when we can."

----

Dying contributes to climate change now.

Just blow my body up with some kind of hilarious weaponry.

 

[WinchesterPremium]

Looking for the science behind it, I found her Master's Thesis and...it is about what you would expect.

Some choice quotes:

So that fat baby playing in the dirt isn’t just communing with the cycles of nature, it is also gaining physical strength directly from the soil.

Bringing up babies playing in dirt is probably bad if you are talking about turning people into dirt.

Author Mark Harris writes that, with parallels in the move from small family farms to huge agri-businesses, “the once simple act of laying our dead to rest has been transmogrifi ed into a large-scale industrial operation that, like any other manufacturing process, requires the inputs of vast amounts of energy and raw materials and leaves a trail of environmental damage in its wake.”8

"Big Funeral Man. Taking over what used to be a small cottage industry. Back in the day people would just bury their loved ones themselves and it was so much closer to nature maaan"

And the pendulum is starting to swing the other way again. Just as the surge in home births illustrates the reclamation of death’s sunny counterpart,

((That sounds like a terrible idea))

It’s no coincidence that he has notified us kids that his end-of-life plan is to walk into the woods on a frigid night;he is a doctor, and understands that death by freezing would be painless, even euphoric.

RED FLAG, RED FLAG

My 3’x 4’ raised bed fi lled with compost created from my family’s food scraps is enough to connect me to the wonders of the ecological systems of which I am a part.

"My garden just makes me so much closer to nature maaan why can we all be like my garden."

The degree and duration of temperatures achieved in static-pile composting are adequate to signifi cantly reduce pathogen survival

While the paper has a bunch of citations...this isn't cited. Boo.

 

[Takodachi]

Jesus, this sounds like something a sociopath would say.
They do realize the funerals are mostly to give the family some peace of mind, right?

But fine, if they insist, I propose that they should lead by example. They should kill la kill themselves and let their bodies rot in the middle of some forest.

 

[whatever I feel like]

Graves are a waste, just throw me out tbh.

 

[Niggaplease]

it's cheaper to just have a natural burial. like they had this shit for years. this isnt a new thing and if my current circumstance doesn't change things (I'm going into wu plague infested territory fuck you boss) then I'm pretty much just going to be buried in the ground in a sheet. I'm not paying for some woke lez upwards of 10000s just to be turned in to mulch. lol no Its only 2000 to dig a deep enough hole and leave me to rot.

 

[ColtWalker1847]

Do you know what is actually a pretty well engineered large-scale environmentally-safe place for decomposition?

The landfill. I say we make one and throw all of these retarded hippies into it.

 

[Pee Cola]

Our hero claims that cremating a human body creates 1.4t of carbon emissions over and above the emissions that would be created by her method. Given that the average human contains approximately 13kg of carbon, and that 1kg of carbon yields approximately 3.7kg of CO2 (viz. 13 * 3.7 = 48.1kg) when released into the atmosphere via combustion, where the fuck is the other 1.395t of CO2 coming from?

If the cremation is being performed in a crematorium using a carbon intensive fuel such as wood, one would need to burn almost 1t of fuel to produce around 1.5t of CO2. Given that many crematoria use fuels such as natural gas, LPG or propane, CO2 emissions per t would be considerably lower.

Bear in mind that an average human body in a wood-fired crematorium only requires around 100kg of wood to achieve full cremation, producing around 150kg of CO2 in the process.

Last time I checked, 150 + 48.1 = 198.1. Or, to keep the units consistent, a whopping 0.2t.

I guess hippies aren't exactly renowned for their scientific or mathematical prowess.

 

[robobobo]

All I can figure for reaching that one ton number is they're taking into account every step of the process. Making the casket/urn, shipping it, embalming/burning the body, toting it to a graveyard, building a headstone, digging a hole, installing the vault, everything. The act of burning up a body and/or tossing it in the ground is hardly a ruinous one to the planet, in and of itself. But what I don't get from this whole thing is what they propose to do with the skeleton, which most assuredly will not break down with thirty days in a compost heap, I don't buy their claims that composting alone will take care of it. I highly suspect they're tossing the body in a wood chipper or something first to crush up the bones into a more manageable size, and isn't that just a beautiful thing to do to your granddad when he kicks the bucket?

Like others already said, if you want a "green" disposal of your body, just get buried without embalming in a plain wooden box. Nature will take care of it soon enough.

 

[The best and greatest]

The numbers don't make much sense. "Save a ton of carbon"? Where's the ton of carbon in a burial? Bury a wooden casket and you're keeping it out of the carbon cycle. And cremation uses energy equivalent to a few kg of gasoline.

Theres a surprising amount of decadence in dying. Lots of fancy caskets made of stained wood, lined with fine cloths and ornamented with metals.

Imo its overindulgent and wasteful. Forget the environment at that point, I just plain balk at the notion of wasting material wealth on a corpse literally incapable of appreciating the show of conspicuous consumption. A pine box for me, thanks.

 

[Dysnomia]

Okay sure, but why don't I just cut out the middleman and wander out into the woods to allow some mammals to scavenge my corpse? I don't need to pay some woke lesbian for the privilege of rotting: that shit happens on its own just fine.

Then you'll waste valuable police time as they try to determine whether or not you were murdered.

I've read a lot about this kind of thing off and on because of stuff like Caitlyn Doughty, the death positive movement, alternative/green funerals etc. The Recomposition thing has been in the works for a long time. A lot of people will see it as liberal elites telling us to eat bugs and not reproduce. It's not personally how I would treat my loved ones bodies unless it's what they wanted.

There's a group of people who feel that rotting and "becoming one with the earth" is deeply spiritual. Pretty hippy but it's harmless. In recomp, people really desire to become plant food. But there is already natural burial directly in the earth or with a biodegradable casket and/shroud. I don't think they are different in outcome. Either way, you will go back to the earth.

It feels almost like a decomposition fetish in that way. But I think there should be more options for getting rid of dead bodies, especially in an environmentally friendly way. If someone wants to pay for this, let them.

It would probably be more useful to legalize water cremation in more states and countries if you really want to reduce the impact of the funeral industry. Recomposition has niche hippy appeal. Water cremation though is less toxic and more appealing to the average person because you get remains to put in an urn or interment like you would with regular fire cremation. It's also affordable with similar prices to regular cremation.

I'm guessing this Seattle dyke is going to charge an insane amount of money just to turn bodies into compost and then bury them in a memorial garden. Which could really be done for free... embalming and funerals outside the home have only been standard for a couple hundred yrs. For most of history in most parts of the world, "natural burial" was just burial.


According to the website, this is what the process is called in technical, legal terms.

Frequently Answered Questions — Recompose

www.recompose.life

I think it will be crazy priced too. Turning off the majority of the public for a long time. A lot of the oldsters still want their traditional funeral anyway.

Funerals and burials are very expensive to begin with. If you cannot afford it you get a charity cremation and a mass ash burial in the potter's field. They should make any green attempts more affordable if they want to save the planet. What's the point if most people can't afford green methods? I think it will eventually get better. But right now it just looks like woke hipsters trying to look environmentally concious of their mortality.

I would like to be buried because I think it would be cool for future archaeologists to find me. But most likely I will just go with cheapo cremation or donate myse lf to science since I am already an organ donor.

 

[CWCissey]

The KLF had the best method of corpse disposal.

Why - Mumufication

MuMufication MuMufication is the act of having a small portion of your cremated cremated remains fired in a Brickof Mu. MuMufied is what you will be after the act of MuMufication has been carried out. What you get in the here and now is a Brick of Mu and a signed and stamped Certificate of...

www.mumufication.com

 

[Maggots on a Train v2]

I can't see how building, maintaining, heating/cooling, and staffing an indoor body rot warehouse is more efficient than getting a Jewish-style ASAP burial in a pine box

 

[Tasty Tatty]

Google Sky Burial.

Same shit except this is full of wokebabble.

 

[Pee Cola]

The KLF had the best method of corpse disposal.

Why - Mumufication

MuMufication MuMufication is the act of having a small portion of your cremated cremated remains fired in a Brickof Mu. MuMufied is what you will be after the act of MuMufication has been carried out. What you get in the here and now is a Brick of Mu and a signed and stamped Certificate of...

www.mumufication.com

For some reason, my first thoughts when I read "KLF" and "corpse disposal" involved stuffing the body with a million quid before cremating it.

 

[WonderWino]

It’s no coincidence that he has notified us kids that his end-of-life plan is to walk into the woods on a frigid night;he is a doctor, and understands that death by freezing would be painless, even euphoric.

lolwut? I think the german sixth army in stalingrad would like a word with this guy about that particular claim. There is nothing painless about freezing to death. Frostbite is not a pleasant experience, let alone freezing to death. a doctor should be well aware of this

 

[Angry New Ager]

I can't see how building, maintaining, heating/cooling, and staffing an indoor body rot warehouse is more efficient than getting a Jewish-style ASAP burial in a pine box

My thoughts exactly.

There are "green burial" cemeteries out here on the Left Coast. I've looked into one for myself, because having my discarded meatsuit pumped full of formaldehyde so it doesn't rot, sealed in a metal box, and buried in a concrete underground bunker strikes me as appalling and barbaric.

I don't even give a shit about a pine box; just wrap me in a sheet, stick me in the ground, and I'm good. It might involve--what? Half a tank of gas for the van to haul me up there, and a couple of minutes with a backhoe to excavate a suitable hole? Okay, they'd have to dispose of a body bag, but that happens for everybody.

Oh, but hey, I'd take up a plot of actual real estate for a long time, and not rot down into nothingness on a tidy (and profitable) schedule. The corporate-controlled collective won't like that; too individualistic.

 

[Comandante Marcos]

When I was planning my own body disposal, I was shocked to learn that by law in the state of California you can NOT be buried in a plain old pine box without embalming. The CHEAPEST casket the funeral home offered was a whopping $1000. And it was still a fancy piece of shit with cloth lining and everything. Embalming is mandatory too IIRC.

I don't believe in cremation for personal reasons, but the cost of burial is just nuts, by fucking law they can not just dig a hole and throw you in because bad for environment reeeee, you have to buy a non-decomposing coffin and embalming and etc. Of course there's lots of money being made from this shit.

And of course it's backed up by a bullshit reading of the Book of Revelation about how bodies need to be preserved because of the rising of the dead and shit. Fuck, I'm not a millenarian (believer in Revelation bullshit) dumbshit, but I still have to get the full Christian burial even though I don't want it. Just toss my body in the fucking river and be done with it, ffs.

 

[ShortBusDriver]

That's why no one will remember your name

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Viking burials or gtfo.

 

[Belligerent Monk]

don't we all eventually just get eaten by bugs in traditional burial anyway? Fuck it. Let them bugs work through some cedar for their dinner. I wanna be loaded into the same non-biodegradeable Styrofoam box they used to put Le Royale w/Cheese in and thrown into a ditch. If anything I want to be even less good for the planet to offset this faggotry.

 

[KiwiJoe]

Just do it like Diogenes and have your dead body just thrown into the local woods (or whatever place that has lots of animals) and let the animals have at it. See, sustainable and you're doing it the traditional way.