In western society you currently have two options when you die, burial or cremation. Now, US architect Katrina Spade wants to revolutionise the way we treat our dead, offering a more sustainable funeral process.
What we do with our dead can seem bizarre to outsiders. In a Tibetan tradition called sky burial, the deceased are cut into small pieces by a man known as the rogyapa, or “breaker of bodies,” and laid atop mountains to be picked apart by vultures. Later, the bones are collected and pulverized with flour and yak butter and fed to crows and hawks. Feeding your loved ones to the same birds who eat roadkill may seem morbid to those of us in the West, but in Tibet, it’s both sacrosanct (these birds are sacred in Buddhism) and practical (ever tried to dig a grave in frozen ground?).
Tibet isn’t the only place with seemingly odd customs: In Madagascar, the bodies of the deceased are exhumed and sprayed with wine and perfume every few years. In Ghana, people are buried in coffins that represent their lives, so a fisherman might spend eternity in a box shaped like a carp and a farmer may spend it in a six-foot cob of corn. These rituals sound weird or even ghastly to us, from half a world away, but are any as bizarre — or as damaging — as what we do with the dead in America?
For most people in this country, there are two options after death: You are buried or you are burned. The costs, both environmental and financial, are significant, but we accept these options because they are all that we know. One Seattle architect wants to change this, to develop a form of body disposal that will both cost little and actually improve the environment. But before we get to that, let’s look at the current state of death in America.
Most Americans, around 55%, are buried after they die. If you choose to be part of this silent majority, and if you opt for an open casket, your body will first be embalmed. This means that you will be drained of blood and injected with a delightful cocktail of formaldehyde, methanol, and other solvents. Pumped into your arteries, the embalming fluid acts as a preservative and slows decomposition by preventing the growth of bacteria that would naturally break down your cells. Basically, you’re pickled.
Next, a mortician will dress you (plastic underwear may be necessary for leaky bodies) and cover you with makeup to make you look as life-like as possible. This may have the opposite effect, turning you into a sort of fleshy mannequin. Someone will probably fix your hair.
Despite the mortician’s efforts, your body will eventually decompose (you aren’t made of styrofoam after all), but embalming makes it take years instead of weeks. Not only are you shot up with more preservatives than a McDonald’s hamburger, but your casket — which has a shell of either hardwood or metal — is then placed in a concrete container lined with plastic to prevent the land around your burial plot from sinking. This system is designed to be impenetrable, to keep out the elements that would naturally aid the body in decomposition, and it takes a lot of resources. Each year, over 30m board feet of wood, 1.6m tonnes of concrete, 750,000 gallons of embalming fluid, and 90,000 tonnes of steel are buried underground in the US alone. You could construct a Golden Gate Bridge with that amount of steel, but we use it to store bodies.
If you choose to be cremated, your body will be placed in a pine box in a high-temperature oven. After a few hours at 1,400 to 1,800 degrees, what’s left is a coarse gray powder with lumps of bone. The environmental impact of this process is not minor. Most crematoria are fueled by gas (a finite resource), and while some facilities use filters or scrubbers to reduce pollutants, cremation still results in soot, carbon monoxide, and trace metals like mercury being released into the air. According to the Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA), each cremation takes 28 gallons of fuel and releases of 540 pounds of carbon dioxide. Multiply this by the 912,000 bodies that are cremated every year in the US, and the FCA estimates that 246,240 tonnes of carbon dioxide are released each year due to cremation, or the equivalent of 41,040 cars.
After cremation, your remains may be stored on a mantel, scattered on a beach, poured in an hourglass, shot into space, turned into diamonds, mixed in with paint, stowed in a drawer, tattooed on a body, buried in coral, turned into concrete, blown into glass, pressed into vinyl, dropped off a boat, worn as jewelry, stirred into wine, or any number of other things. In my family, the tradition is to pack your loved one’s ashes in double baggies and ship them to your children around the country. Or at least that’s what my grandmother did when my grandfather died, attaching a note to put him on top of the TV for better reception.
What your ashes cannot do is nourish life. Cremated remains are devoid of nutrients, and so your ashes are less likely to fertilize the ground they are scattered on than bird shit falling from the sky. You’re dust.
There are a few other options for body disposal in America, but they are not without flaws. Always dreamed of burial at sea? Good luck. You can’t just hire a dingy and have your loved ones dump you overboard. At-sea burials are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, and hiring a company to do it for you will cost over $10,000. There’s also “green” or “natural” burial, which means a body isn’t embalmed or entombed and is allowed to decompose naturally, but there aren’t that many sites that allow this in the US, and most of them are in rural areas. For the vast majority of Americans, the choices are conventional burial or cremation.
But Katrina Spade wants to change this.
Specifically, Spade has made it her goal in life to give Americans another option for disposing of their bodies: human composting. Instead of being buried or burned when you die, your body could go to a “compost-based renewal facility”. The facility is essentially an enclosed building with a three-story “core” filled with organic material and encircled by a sloping walkway. During your funeral service, your body would be shrouded in linen and your friends and family would walk you to the top of the core and lay you within the soil.
“Bodies, our bodies,” Spade says, “will be laid into the ground and covered with wood chips. There would also be some other carbon materials that would help the process work a little more efficiently, like sawdust, which is very high-carbon, and possibly something like alfalfa straw.” The process of turning from human to soil is surprisingly quick. The UDP’s website says that within a few weeks of interment, “the body decomposes and turns into a nutrient-rich compost. The process is continuous – new bodies are laid into the system as finished compost is extracted below.”
There is precedent for this kind of burial, and it comes from agriculture. “Thank goodness,” Spade says. “I really don’t think I’m the appropriate person to create a brand new process, but I do think that I’m the right person to take a process that’s been studied by agriculture and universities for a number of years now. The research is out there.”
Spade explains that when animals die on farms and can’t be butchered, their bodies are processed using “static mortality composting.” About 18 inches of wood chips are spread in a field, and the animal is laid on top and covered with another 18 inches of wood chips so it resembles a mulch pile. After a couple months, the animal is just … gone. With humans, Spade says, all that remains will be the artificial parts of us, “things like titanium hips and gold teeth”. Even your bones will disappear.
Unlike a traditional graveyard, however, you could go home with your loved ones in the form of soil. You could then spread them in a garden or under a tree planted in their honor, and, Spade says, even public parks could be fertilized with the soil, so cities would be nourished by the people who lived in them.
If Katrina Spade gets her way, human composting will someday be as normal as burial or cremation, and maybe, eventually, it will replace them both. It may sound odd now, but is draining the body and filling it with formaldehyde any less bizarre? We accept burial and cremation because they’re what we know, but maybe human composting is the greater option. It’s cheaper, more ecological, and it keeps the cycle going: You aren’t ashes. You aren’t dust. You’re earth. Read the article in full here: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/10/a-greener-afterlife-is-human-composting-the-future-for-funerals
Given the cost and the environmental impact of both burial and cremation, should our country be seriously exploring alternative options for dealing with the dead? With many councils running out of available land for cemeteries should Spade's notion of human composting be adopted in our country?
How would a decision like this impact on cultural and religious values?
Environment? Culture? Religion?
What's more important?
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It is proposed that human composting should replace the options of burial or cremation in our country