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Death is a topic that most of us prefer not to think too much about. While we must all acknowledge its inevitability, on a day-to-day basis, it feels better to keep it up on a shelf in a box, out of reach from quotidian life. Then again, there are decisions to be made, and they really do need to be made in advance of those inexorable metamorphic events. This week on Sea Change Radio, we learn about the burgeoning green funeral industry from the CEO and Founder of Recompose, Katrina Spade. We look at the environmental problems associated with conventional burial and cremation, hear about the rather unusual modern history of embalming in the US, and go deep on the subject of human composting.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Katrina Spade (KS) | 00:13 – Green Funerals are growing. There’s a lot of interest in bringing and looking at new ways of caring for bodies after death that aren’t polluting and aren’t toxic.
Narrator | 00:26 – Death is a topic that most of us prefer not to think too much about. While we must all acknowledge its inevitability on a day-to-day basis, it feels better to keep it up on a shelf in a box out of reach from quotidian life. Then again, there are decisions to be made and they really do need to be made in advance of those inexorable metamorphic events. This week on Sea Change Radio, we learn about the burgeoning green funeral industry from the CEO and founder of Recompose Katrina Spade. We look at the environmental problems associated with conventional burial in cremation, hear about the rather unusual modern history of embalming in the US and go deep on the subject of human composting.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:34 I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Katrina Spade. She is the founder and CEO of Recompose. Katrina, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Katrina Spade (KS) | 01:46 – Thank you very much.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:48 – Before we dive into the services that your company offers, why don’t you explain from an environmental perspective, what’s been the problem for a few dozen centuries in the way humans bury their dead? Why can we do better from an environmental standpoint?
Katrina Spade (KS) | 02:09 – So the way we currently bury our dead, I’ll call that conventional burial started around the Civil War, and that’s when modern embalming was invented by a couple of entrepreneurial young people, <laugh>, who said, look at this market of potential clients. They actually went out to the battlefields in the south and pre-sold the service of embalming to soldiers who might die. And that was a way to get those bodies back from the south to the north after death. And they used arsenic, I think at the time. Now it’s a formaldehyde-based process or solution. So interestingly, I mean, people have still do and have for millennia had their dead out to say goodbye to them, but they’ve looked dead as opposed to looked embalmed. So it’s perfectly fine and pretty common in other parts of the world to have a dead person who’s un embalmed be out for a goodbye and a viewing and a what is relatively new like it since the Civil War, is this idea that we should pump the body full of embalming fluid to preserve it as long as we can. That practice is not religious based. It’s not, it’s not even really like a deep cultural basis in, in terms of its history. It’s, uh, really was this very practical way of getting soldiers back to their homes.
AW | 03:30 – It also coincided with the birth of photography as well, I imagine. So people would want to capture a photo with their loved one before they buried them, right?
KS | 03:42 – Great point. I mean, I just say again, you don’t need to embalm someone to get a picture of them when they’ve died.
AW | 03:47 – But they look a little better this way.
KS | 03:49 – I don’t know. I think you, you could say “better.” I could say “different.”
AW | 03:53 – That was the pitch in the 1880s or something, right?
KS | 03:55 – Yeah, that was absolutely the pitch. Well, and, and you know what’s fascinating is President Lincoln was embalmed when he died. And they put him on a train and took him on a 13-city trip and it was amazing marketing for the process of embalming. Because everyone got to see Lincoln looking pretty preserved <laugh>. Right. Um, you know, just looking at that history is pretty interesting. And then that just, that became convention in the United States and Canada and nowhere else in the world do we embalm on any regular, in any regular fashion. But here in the US we think, oh, well that’s just what you have to do. And I want to say to your listeners, if anyone says you have to be embalmed, they’re telling you something that’s untrue and you should push back if you don’t want that for your person. Like, it’s not required by law in almost every circumstance.
AW | 04:44 – But embalming is just one of the pieces from an environmental standpoint that’s not very conscious when it comes to handling our dead, correct?
KS | 04:53 – Oh yeah. I get excited about that history because I think it’s so fascinating. Um, I can touch on the environmental pieces a little more, but I think one of the sort of overriding themes is that we’ve held death at a distance for some time. It’s, it’s a natural, well, I don’t want natural, but it’s, it’s a thing that is pretty culturally familiar for us. Be like, I don’t want to talk about it. And all of that distance we’ve put between us and the end of life has, has allowed a fair amount of myths and, um, untruths to be pushed not by everyone in the industry because there’s some wonderful funeral homes and funeral directors out there, but like, you know, it’s kind of allowed this per idea that like maybe embalming is required. Like we shouldn’t think too hard about, about what’s going on in this industry. Okay. So the environmental harm is, is partly about embalming.
AW | 05:48 – Sorry, I had gotten you off of embalming, but why don’t you explain why embalming is bad for the environment?
KS | 05:54 – Thank you. Well, embalming today is, is a formaldehyde-based liquid that the person’s body is, and I’ll be a little bit graphic here. So for anyone listening we’re, uh, drained of its natural body fluids. And then those body fluids are replaced by formaldehyde-based solution, and that’s meant to preserve the corpse, which it does for some time. Nothing can preserve a body forever, but it’s, um, but it’s meant to preserve the body for some time, maybe years. And formaldehyde is not good for the environment. It’s not great for the funeral directors who are using it either. As a side note, it’s a carcinogen. And so that’s unfortunate as well. Then you think about that body being buried embalmed into a casket. It’s usually made of hardwood or metal. And then that casket is typically, buried into a concrete box so that you can mow over a nice flat cemetery and that mowing goes on forever and the watering of the cemetery goes on forever and it takes up a fair amount of land. So that’s, that’s the environmental perspective on the burial side.
AW | 07:08 – Sticking with embalming for a second, does the embalming leak out of the coffin situation? Or is, or is that unique to certain practices where they don’t necessarily entomb it in concrete, let’s say?
KS | 07:23 – I think it depends on moisture in the ground, how strong the concrete was, et cetera. I think again, you know, nothing stays forever. So even a metal casket will start to degrade underground. Even a concrete box will start to degrade underground. For me, it’s almost less the risk of formaldehyde say in the ground water, then it is about asking ourselves why we’re doing that and is it meaningful, clearly isn’t great for the planet to be burying formaldehyde laden bodies in the ground and all that stuff, right?
AW | 08:02 – Especially when you think of the ashes to ashes, dust to dust idea of the re regeneration and recycling ourselves, that is eliminated when you introduce carcinogens to the equation. Correct.
KS | 08:14 – Exactly. And so then what’s happened in the United States is over time cremation for various reasons has become more popular than burial. So today in the US almost 60% of people choose to be cremated. Burial is actually kind of going away slowly but surely, I think. And we’ve got this replacement of cremation, which takes, um, fossil fuel to burn a body, um, uses, I can’t remember the, the sort of equivalent miles driven by a car that are equivalent to cremation particulates, mercury, and importantly carbon are emitted into the atmosphere. And the, the carbon footprint between cremation and burial are interestingly the same, about 540 pounds of carbon per person. And again, i I, this is how I started the work I started to say, but why, why are we cremating someone? If you have anything left to give at the end of life in this body that will might be not much at the time. Why not give it back to the planet rather than burn it up or bury it in a formaldehyde solution? Right.
AW | 09:25 – If you can explain the lifecycle of conventional burial, that would be helpful.
KS | 09:29 – Yeah. So we had a lifecycle assessment done in a few years ago looking at conventional burial. The inputs and conventional burial are that casket manufacture and transport, the concrete manufacture and transport, the ongoing mowing and maintenance of the cemetery itself, then the headstone manufacture and transport. When you put all of that together, you get the carbon footprint of conventional burial.
AW | 09:53 – Go on. Sorry, I interrupted you. You were talking about cremation versus conventional burial.
KS | 09:59 – So on the cremation side, you’ve got the input of fossil fuels to burn a body. It’s a little more straightforward in terms of the tallying, and that makes up the carbon footprint on the cremation side. And interestingly, both conventional burial and cremation, when you look at those next to each other with their carbon footprints, they’re about the same. And so when you start at that, if the first question, you know, is like, how can you avoid those emissions so that you can re like reduce or eliminate that 540 pounds of carbon? And then the second thing is, and I’m now going to start, you know, waxing poetic about human composting <laugh>. The second thing is how do you actually add benefit to the, the, the whole equation? And you do that through sequestering carbon. So, so when you look at conventional burial, cremation on one side and over here you have human composting where you’re actually transforming bodies into soil, you’re sequestering carbon in the process and you’re also avoiding those emissions, then, then the equation becomes about a metric ton of carbon per person because you’ve got the avoidance of emissions plus the sequestration of, of carbon.
Music Break | 11:23
AW | 12:22 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Katrina Spade. She is the CEO and founder of Recompose. So Katrina, why don’t you spell out the services that your organization offers the public and give us a little bit of the competitive landscape as well. What are some of the options out there for people who don’t live in the Seattle area where you’re based?
KS | 12:45 – I have good news for people who are looking at options. Green funerals are growing. There’s a lot of interest in bringing and looking at new ways of caring for, for bodies after death that aren’t polluting and aren’t toxic. So Recompose has a facility in Seattle, Washington and we offer the service of human composting as an alternative to cremation or burial. And with that we also offer opportunity for ceremony ritual and marking that moment, you know, in a beautiful place to, um, to go with the important how we care for the body itself. We have been open since late 2020 and have served over 450 people with this service. Um, the process wasn’t legal when we started out. It’s now legal in 12 states and counting. But it’s only available in a handful of places. Seattle being one of them. One thing that’s pretty cool but does reduce the carbon benefit is that quite a few of our clients actually come to us from out of state, which takes one last plane ride after you’ve died. And it’s actually pretty common for bodies to be flown around interestingly. Um, but we have quite a few clients that come to us. It’s so important to them to have this service that they come up to Seattle for their death care.
AW | 14:07 – So why is it illegal in 38 states? And maybe you can expand a little more on how you treat the body and how that’s different from conventional burial.
KS | 14:18 – Yes. Human composting is a really highly managed, um, process that happens where we are taking the concept of natural decomposition and encouraging it and making the perfect environment for microbial activity to break a body all the way down into soil or compost. And we do that inside of buildings or a building here in Seattle. And inside of specially designed equipment, composting is always managed by human beings. Natural decomposition ha happens out there in nature in the woods by itself. Composting is when you take that and then you manage it even better by making sure you’ve got the right ratio of carbon and nitrogen and moisture. So very specifically at Recompose, we have a vessel that’s a stainless steel vessel. We lie, uh, lay a mixture of woodchips, alfalfa and straw into the bottom of that vessel and place the person’s body on top of it and then add more of that plant material in. So the person’s body’s really cocooned in this woodchips alfalfa and straw mixture. Over the next 30 days. The person’s body is decomposing naturally. We’ve created this perfect environment for that to happen. And we’re con constantly reading out like what is the temperature inside that vessel? Those when temperatures rise, we know that the microbial activities happening and the work is being done and then we take the soil out after about a month. Our team sorts for things like non-organic materials, if you have a titanium hip that’ll be recycled. And also for large bone pieces, which we then reduce mechanically. Everything is then placed back into a curing container for a couple of, a couple of weeks of curing, which is a compost term. And then the soil is ready to give back to family or be donated to conservation efforts.
AW | 16:23 – And how do they receive it? What is a, a human composted heap or bag or body? Like what, what, what is the form that one receives it in?
KS | 16:32 – Well, one of the things that makes this so different from something like cremation where you’re familiar with the size of the cremated remains you might get back is that because we use so much plant material to successfully compost a body, we’re giving back about a cubic yard of soil that is enough to fill a pickup truck.
AW | 16:50 – Wow.
KS | 16:51 – Yeah. It’s kind of a lot.
AW | 16:53 – How many pounds are we talking about for like 150 pound person?
KS | 16:56 – We’re talking about maybe like four, 800 pounds. I know we’re making a lot of, we’re creating a lot of compost out of a person, which is part of the reason why we have this great land program where you can donate that soil to conservation efforts up here in the Pacific Northwest. But we also bag it up really nice. I mean, honestly it’s like a lot like, um, the bags you’d get at a nursery and people use it for their home gardens. They use it to plant a tree and honor their loved one, and they might donate half and take a couple of bags home.
AW | 17:30 – And why is this illegal in so many states? Why do governments drag their feet to accept this as a standard operating procedure when it comes to handling our dead?
KS | 17:40 – So most states list out burial, cremation, or donation to a body, to science as like the three legal methods of disposition. So when we started thinking about this back in the early teens, we decided we really needed to create statute that would add human composting as another option. And we started in Washington state, and to be honest, 12 states in a couple of years was way faster than we thought this would actually change. I mean, the funeral industry hasn’t changed in a long, long time and people are a little bit afraid of talking about death sometimes. And so that combination made us think it would take longer to get this many states legal. But we’re seeing a real interest in this idea as my goal long-term is like as a replacement for cremation.
AW | 18:33 – And is there a path for another 30, 35 states to come aboard?
KS | 18:39 – Once we get a bill in front of committee, it typically does pretty well and is quite bipartisan. Or once a bill gets to the senator to the house, same thing. Pretty bipartisan. It’s, um, it’s not terribly controversial. Um, that said, we haven’t seen any ballot initiatives. It’s been all legislature. So we’re actually creating new statute. So usually we have to take like, um, existing death care statute. Okay, what do you do for cremation? And then we’re, you know, adjusting it to make sense for human composting. Make sure the regulations are gonna provide, um, enough oversight to make a really safe final material. because we’re giving this back to family and friends to use on plants and trees. Right? So there is some regulation that goes with it as well. So it’s pretty straightforward, but it’s not like, um, rubber stamp yet.
Music Break | 19:40
AW | 20:35 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Katrina Spade. She’s the CEO and founder of Recompose. So Katrina, you were talking about how your company handles the human composting process. How did you learn how to do this and are you still refining your process?
KS | 20:56 – I’ve learned so much over the last 10 years or so. When I started thinking about this, I was in graduate school for architecture. I was thinking about the funeral industry, looking at the options we had and, and wondering why there wasn’t something better and more environmentally friendly, frankly. And, um, over the years it’s been about finding the experts who can help move this huge project forward that started with legal experts and then moving towards, um, biology and engineering, how to create a system that would safely and effectively compost a body. Um, when I was in grad school for architecture, again, I was thinking about how to bring, how to design a more sustainable option for the care of our bodies. And my friend Kate <laugh> called me on the phone one day and said she knew she, I was thinking about death care. She knew I loved composting, I guess. And she said, have you heard of this practice that farmers use to compost cows, whole cows? And I thought, well, I mean, it was a light bulb moment. Of course, if you can compost a cow, you can compost a human being. So that’s the biology and the research behind all of this is based on livestock composting. And there’s a lot of research that’s been created around that process. And of course it’s, it’s similar to how you compost a human being.
AW | 22:19 – When people think of grieving and mourning over a, a a lengthy period, a lot of them are informed by pop culture, TV movies where you see somebody talking to the gravestone. We grow up with that imagery. Like when somebody dies, you go to their grave and you cry over them, and then you place flowers every few months and you visit them if you want. And you have conversations that sometimes can be very eloquent on in movies and stuff, <laugh>. But how does that reality differ in a green burial? Or does it, there’s also status involved in there has been since Pharonic periods, right? People pay a lot of money to have their family get a good spot in a cemetery, for example. Right.
KS | 23:05 – I agree with you that pop culture really loves to show someone graveside. And when you were saying that, I was thinking to myself, I don’t think I actually know anyone who’s been buried. So all the people who I’ve known and loved who’ve died except for my mother-in-law, who was buried in a very different manner and in natural burial, which I can get into, but not in a cemetery. I don’t know anyone who has a headstone in a cemetery. I don’t think that, you know, that, that I knew when they were alive. And I don’t think I’m alone in that. It’s, it’s really wonderful when, when we can have some sort of ritual, some sort of marking of the moment when someone’s died and some way to re remember them. And for our clients, what we see is it’s about planting, it’s about, um, growing new life. It’s actually about the natural ecosystem and that being part of that ecosystem and really not just being part of it. Like, oh, right, I’m in the world, but when I die, my molecules are going to cycle right back into something huge. And so I think that we don’t really have a graveside equivalent exactly, but we do have, we’re seeing a lot of ceremony in the planting of the tree, gathering friends and family planting that tree or, um, you know, one client we have has a rose garden that her husband’s soil has been nourishing. And so that rose garden is, is very, has significant meaning to her. And that’s her, you know, headstone, if you will.
AW | 24:38 – So you’ve explained the human composting process. Can you give us an idea of the options that may be out there beyond human composting? Just you mentioned the natural burial process. If you can summarize the green funeral space for us in the brief time we have, that would be helpful.
KS | 24:58 – Yeah. Overall natural burial is something that’s been done for millennia, and it still happens all over the world today. It’s when the body is placed directly in the ground without that concrete box. Typically in a wooden, you know, wooden ca coffin or, um, sometimes a shroud instead of a actual box. Sometimes that natural burial happens in conservation pl places and sometimes it happens in a relatively normal cemetery, but it’s very much about not embalming. Letting the body go back to the earth directly still takes land. So I would argue it’s not really a solution for our urban populations, but it’s a pretty beautiful idea in my opinion. So the other thing that people might have heard of is called alkaline hydrolysis or acclamation. And this is a process where the body is dissolved in of similar piece of equipment to a cremation retort, but it’s dissolved using a, a liquid solution of that’s high alkaline. And then what families get back is actually the bone that has been reduced after the process is done and the rest goes to wastewater. And it’s, I believe, something like 80% less energy than cremation with flame. Sometimes that’s called water cremation too.
AW | 26:21 – And can you give us an idea of the price variance within all of these options?
KS | 26:28 – So cremation by fire is typically going to be the least expensive option, and you should be able to find that for under a thousand dollars if it’s very much a direct, what they call direct cremation, um, burial in the conventional manner with embalming and a casket. And a headstone typically is starting around $12,000, if not more. It’s an, it’s the most expensive option. And if some places it’s really hard to find a plot to buy a plot in New York City, I’m not sure you really can. And so that’s going to be even more expensive if you can figure out how to do it. Um, natural burial really ranges. So my best recent understanding is probably going to be around seven or $8,000 for the place, the plot and, and the process and working with the funeral home. Um, and then for Recomposes service, we’re at $7,000 for the process of human composting, and that includes care of the body, um, the paperwork by our funeral directors, the transformation into soil and option to donate that to conservation efforts or take that soil home.
AW | 27:39 – So if human composting and natural burial are, are in the same ballpark financially generally?
KS | 27:45 – Yep, you got it.
AW | 27:46 – She’s the CEO and founder of Recompose and people can go to Recompose.life to find them online. Katrina, Spade – Katrina, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
KS | 28:00 – Thank you for having me.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis. And our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Blue Oyster Cult, Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss and the Grateful Dead. To read a transcript of this show, go to Sea Change Radio dot com stream, or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.