Human composting, now legal in six states, is on the rise as an alternative to burial or cremation.
If you’ve thought at all about what to do with your body after you die, it’s probably come down to one of three options: burial, cremation, or donating your remains to science. But there are a lot more options now, including ones you might not have thought of.
In recent years, there has been a groundswell of interest in alternative options for disposing of human remains, especially in methods that minimize death’s carbon footprint. After all, the cremation process emits hundreds of pounds of carbon dioxide, and the toxic chemicals used to embalm, bury, and cremate pollute the environment. Cost is also a factor, with traditional funerals costing $7,000 to $10,000 on average.
New York recently became the sixth US state to legalize natural organic reduction (NOR), a practice better known as human composting. The process involves putting the body in a reusable steel cylinder packed with biodegradable materials such as alfalfa, straw, and wood chips. The bacteria that already lives in the body will break down the remains in about a month, after which the bones are removed and ground down in a process similar to cremation. Another two to six weeks later, you’re left with several hundred pounds of soil that can be used for gardening or can be spread in designated memorial grounds or forest conservation areas. Five US-based companies have established NOR facilities so far.
Another option that’s gaining interest is alkaline hydrolysis, or water cremation, in which bodies are dissolved in water. That option is legal in about two dozen states.
Efforts to “personalize” death also include the rise of custom-made eco-friendly caskets, and home funerals in which families and loved ones can spend more time saying goodbye to the deceased.
While such practices are just beginning to gain traction, some of them mark a return to how bodies have been handled for most of human history.
“I like to refer to green burial and natural organic reduction as neo-traditional,” said Tanya Marsh, a professor of law at Wake Forest University School of Law and the author of The Law of Human Remains. “We’re not inventing some radical new way of disposing of human remains. We’re just basically going back to basics,” she said.
Marsh is a legal advisor to Recompose, a Seattle-based green funeral home and the first in the US to offer human composting. She’s been closely watching the rapidly changing death care industry in the US, and spoke to Today, Explained’s Noel King about how funeral homes, cemeteries, and other businesses are struggling to keep up with changing attitudes and needs about what to do with our bodies after we die.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation between Marsh and King, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
Noel King
When did humans start getting more formal with how we dealt with bodies after we die?
Tanya Marsh
Every society and religion handles human remains in their own particular way that is formal and that they perceive to be respectful. And that’s one of the things that separates humans from other animals: We attach a lot of meaning to the disposition of human remains. But what one society or religious group views as respectful, another may view as extremely disrespectful. So there’s a lot of variety in the formality, but it is universal.
The prevailing norm in the United States for the 20th century was embalming; open-casket viewing of the body; a casketed burial in a vault or a grave liner. That really started, with all of those component parts, in the late 1800s. It was really the period between WWI and WWII, and certainly by WWII, that embalming became the norm for disposition in the United States.
Noel King
Prior to that, would it have just been, you go in the ground?
Tanya Marsh
As long as we’ve had cities, there have been differences between disposition methods. In more densely populated areas, because people didn’t have space and they didn’t have as ready access to land, it would be more common earlier in US history to have employed an outside person to help with preparing the body for disposition and maybe even transporting the body to the cemetery. In rural areas, families tended to do it all themselves. Before we had funeral directors, undertakers typically made caskets and they provided transportation to the cemeteries, and in a lot of small towns they also sold furniture.
Noel King
Oh, that’s so interesting. And actually, it makes complete sense. Now, in 2023, I would say I know a fair number of people who have been cremated or who would like to be cremated. When did that become more popular?
Tanya Marsh
The rising popularity of cremation has been absolutely phenomenal. It was legalized in the United States, starting in the late 1800s. In 1980, we were still right on the verge of double digits, from upper 9 percent to 10 percent. But in 2021, which is the most recent number for which we have statistics, the cremation rate was 57.5 percent. So between 1980 and 2021, it went from 10 percent to almost 60 percent. That’s just a meteoric rise in a very short period of time.
Noel King
Why did that happen?
Tanya Marsh
First of all, cost. Cremation can be much less expensive than the full casketed funeral and burial. The second reason is flexibility. If I’m going to put a body in a grave, I have to pick a cemetery and I have to make that decision very quickly around the time of death. But if my body’s going to be cremated, I can decide later how I want those remains to be divided among family members or scattered in different, meaningful places. And the final reason is that we have a much more mobile society, and so with a diminished connection to a particular place, do you want to leave your body in a cemetery where nobody’s ever going to visit, or would you rather have your remains scattered in places that were meaningful to you?
Noel King
Are there other practices that are growing in popularity that you think are interesting?
Tanya Marsh
Natural organic reduction is definitely the one that has risen in popularity the most quickly in recent years. The other one that’s emerging is called alkaline hydrolysis or water cremation. It’s a way of reducing the human body to a substance that’s similar to cremated remains, in a process that involves water and a base solution. It is perceived as more environmentally friendly than cremation. It consumes less energy. It costs about the same. It’s been legalized in about half the states but hasn’t really taken off in terms of popularity. We don’t have great numbers for it, but it’s not crowding out cremation, by any sense.
Noel King
I was surprised to see New York State has legalized human composting because, I guess, as an American, I always think we can do whatever we want, right? But no, this did have to be made legal.
Tanya Marsh
This is all state law. It’s not federal law. And so each state defines by statute which methods of disposition are legal in that state. So, back in the late 1800s, they had to go state by state to get cremation legalized, and now they’re having to go state by state to get NOR and alkaline hydrolysis legalized. The states regulate the methods of disposition, and then they also regulate who can practice funeral services. By restricting the group of folks who can practice in this area, that’s another way of limiting innovation.
Noel King
How are cemeteries and funeral homes adapting to the fact that customers now want something different?
Tanya Marsh
Funeral homes and cemeteries are adapting in different ways. You’re going to see a lot of small funeral homes closing, especially in more rural areas, because the economics just don’t fundamentally work. You’re seeing more consolidation, more economies of scale in more urban areas. You have a couple national publicly traded companies in this area. You also have some privately held aggregators that own a number of funeral homes. They can compete better, even with falling margins, as people spend less on funerals and choose less expensive alternatives. Cemeteries were all built at a time when you had nearly 100 percent of deaths resulting in burial. And now we’ve got about 40 percent of deaths resulting in burial. Those economics are fundamentally skewed. So you’re going to see a lot of abandoned cemeteries and cemeteries having to put up cell phone towers or invite people in for using it as green space or becoming members or friends of the cemetery. For some cemeteries in urban areas that’ll work, and for some cemeteries it just won’t.
Noel King
So when a cemetery goes bankrupt, it’s either, go to the public, or find some way of getting money, or just cease to exist.
Tanya Marsh
Right. But unlike other types of real estate, a cemetery can’t be redeveloped. It’s not a shopping mall that can be torn down. So for most abandoned cemeteries, the folks who are running it or owned it, they’d just walk away. And then it’s either left to get overgrown and become a nuisance for the area or the state is going to come in and take over maintenance obligations. We haven’t really had a conversation that I think we need to have with the states. They’re going to start needing to think about how to step up and provide some financing to take care of some of these cemeteries. This is a big land use in the United States. There’s a lot of cemeteries. And for the health of our communities, we need that space to be taken care of.
Noel King
I’m from a rural area, and all of what you’re saying tracks for me for rural cemeteries. I feel like once or twice a year I come across a story about a cemetery in a big city that is just too full. What are the options there? Is it to somehow pack more people in or say, look, this cemetery is closed?
Tanya Marsh
We have a lot of closed cemeteries. There are cities in this country where you’re not legally allowed to bury another body. In fact, New York City started closing down cemeteries in the early 1800s. So that’s definitely an option on the table. But most of the large urban cemeteries that are still open are trying to find less land-intensive ways of disposing of bodies. So maybe we don’t have room for single graves anymore. But could you stack graves? Could you build a multi-story mausoleum or columbarium? Could you create scattering gardens? There are some urban cemeteries that are really interested in grave recycling, which is something that’s routinely practiced in Europe, and we just don’t have much of a tradition of here. So you might rent a grave for 50 or 75 years, and then when your lease is up, whatever is left is going to be put in a communal part of the cemetery, and then that grave can be released to someone else.
Industry professionals — conservative, entrenched, traditional cemeterians — are asking me about the chances for legalizing grave recycling. I think there’s a lot of interest there. So I do think we’re going to see grave recycling within the next 10 years. It’s just really exciting. This is the most fundamental change in death care and disposition practices in a thousand years.
I think that we’re entering an era where a lot of funeral directors are in their 60s. They’re going to retire. They’re not going to be replaced by members of their family. You’ve got consumers demanding a lot of change. The laws are an immovable object and changing consumer demand is an irresistible force. So I think we are going to see a lot of messy change in the next 10 years.