The Environmental Case for Composting Your Body
The aging hippie spirit is still alive and well in the state of Washington. On Tuesday, Democratic governor and presidential candidate Jay Inslee signed a bill that allows composting as a legal alternative to burial and cremation. The bill was sponsored by Democratic state senator Jamie Pedersen, who said his office initially got some pretty angry pushback for it. "The image they have," he told the Associated Press, "is that you’re going to toss Uncle Henry out in the backyard and cover him with food scraps."
The process isn't quite that DIY, according to the AP:
It allows licensed facilities to offer "natural organic reduction," which turns a body, mixed with substances such as wood chips and straw, into about two wheelbarrows’ worth of soil in a span of several weeks. Loved ones are allowed to keep the soil to spread, just as they might spread the ashes of someone who has been cremated—or even use it to plant vegetables or a tree.
Like every other industry, burials produce a great deal of the greenhouse gases that are inching us toward the worst possible outcomes of climate change, on top of using up and polluting land in less apocalyptic ways. It's a bummer, but right now we aren't even carbon neutral when we die.
As Shannon Palus wrote in The Atlantic, a traditional cremation burns through two full SUV tanks' worth of gas. Nationwide, the process emits 250,000 tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. And, Palus notes, even a new "green cremation" method that uses a chemical bath instead of burning fuel, and is now legal in a handful of states, still uses a massive amount of water.
Traditional burial is an even bigger ecological nightmare. Typically, a body is pumped full of embalming fluid (a known carcinogen), placed inside a hardwood coffin (which contributes to deforestation and decomposes slowly), and then buried in a cement box. All of those measures help to slow the body's decomposition, but they don't prevent it entirely. According to Katrina Spade, director of the Urban Death Project, whose research helped to inspire the bill in Washington, this causes the body to decay anaerobically, which produces methane, a gas that has an even bigger greenhouse effect than carbon. And, as Spade writes in the Huffington Post, cemeteries also have a massive carbon footprint:
Further emissions are produced by the manufacture and transportation of embalming fluids, caskets and grave liners, and by the frequent mowing of acres of manicured cemetery lawns. Finally, especially now that more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, using arable land as a permanent resting place for our deceased means fewer crops grown close to urban centers, increasing the amount of food that must be transported from afar.
The law is expected to go into effect in May of next year. That gives interested Washington residents plenty of time to decide just what plants they'd like to fertilize.
Originally Appeared on GQ
