I'd rather be buried in the woods. Closer to nature, and should be much cheaper, but this is better than most alternatives.
By Brendan Kiley, The Seattle Times
Published: January 24, 2021, 6:00am
Somewhere in Kent, tucked anonymously into acres of warehouses and light-industrial workshops, the first full-service human-composting funeral home in the United States is operational.
After nearly a decade of planning, research and fundraising — not to mention a successful campaign to change state law — Recompose is finally converting people into soil.
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The first bodies were “laid in” on Dec. 20, 2020, a landmark moment on a
nearly 10-year journey for Recompose founder and CEO Katrina Spade. She
first began mulling funerary alternatives during a minor mortality
crisis of her own, as an architecture student at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, with a partner and two young children.
Spade researched her options, which were limited to traditional burial
(too toxic and expensive), cremation (too carbon-intensive) and rural
green burial (too rare and inconvenient for most city dwellers). She
started thinking about composting as a kind of soil-based cremation and,
in 2013, finished her Master’s thesis: “Of Dirt and Decomposition:
Proposing a Place for the Urban Dead.”
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In 2020, two other NOR competitors emerged: Herland Forest, a natural-burial cemetery in Klickitat County with one vessel (which it calls a “cradle”) and Return Home, which plans to open its Auburn facility with dozens of vessels in April.
Recompose costs $5,500 for everything: the body pickup (in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties), the paperwork, the process itself and an optional service. (Body transport from further away can be arranged, for an extra fee, and Recompose has already accepted bodies from California and the East Coast.)
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