Traditional burials and cremation aren't great for the environment:
[...] Recompose began as a graduate school thesis from founder Katrina Spade and turned into a full-scale funeral home that transforms human bodies into compost, allowing loved ones' remains to be used in gardens, forests, or other green spaces. From the seed of an idea, the company has designed an effective and respectful way to compost bodies, as well as helped to make the technique legal in several states.
[...] Traditional burial methods harm the environment: embalming buries gallons of toxic fluids underground with each body, while cremation causes about 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. Composting methods for livestock carcasses were perfected in the past few decades, but composting a human body—especially in an urban environment without available farmland, and using composting materials and processes respectful to human experiences with death—hadn't yet been addressed.
[...] The company also worked with lawmakers in Washington to legalize human composting as an option in 2019. As of 2023, the practice is now also legal in California, Colorado, New York, Oregon, and Vermont.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03, @07:50AM (5 children)
The recomposting page seems like marketing fluff that ignores the environmental impact of human composting.
Many people have probably accumulated mercury (in fat and dental fillings etc) and other toxins in significant amounts after decades of living. Is the environmental impact acceptable?
Most livestock haven't been around for decades eating all sorts of stuff. Nor do many get mercury amalgam fillings in their teeth.
Not saying that stuff like cremation is better, but those doing that seem to be at least aware of the problem already (even if many aren't doing anything about it).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Friday March 03, @10:22AM
Fair question, but compare it to the alternative. Since burial plots are unaffordable to many, they opt for cremation, which will release all that mercury into the air.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Informative) by janrinok on Friday March 03, @12:16PM (3 children)
That mercury was here, in some form or other, long before man and there is nothing to indicate that after any other method of body disposal it does not pose the same risk as human composting.
What is done to protect the environment before cremation or burial? Well the answer is here [collier-law.com] and here [eirene.ca]. Why cannot such things be done before human composting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 04, @01:39PM (2 children)
Are they going to do it though? Where do they say they're going to do it?
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday March 04, @05:36PM (1 child)
Where does it say that they won't?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @04:44AM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Friday March 03, @09:06AM (1 child)
Effective, little doubt. Respectful? I'm sure there's no debate about that.
Is this in the U.S., or worldwide? "Oh no", burial results in 3 grams of waste per person, per year, for the whole world?!?! Lord help us!!
"Perfected"? Really? Somehow I bet scientists in 50-100 years will have a different viewpoint...
See above; I'm sure our cultural attitudes (which are definitely uniform across the globe) will be exactly the same in another 20-50 years.
If you want to argue that such-and-such is more efficient ecologically, biodegradably, sustainably, etc.: sure. I'll buy that. But don't even pretend that you can find one solution for, not only today, but the cultural practices of the entire planet for the next 100 years or whatever.
You can make this work scientifically, or religiously. Don't pretend that you can reconcile carbon footprints with "thou shalt not eat things with cloven hooves" with that. C'mon.
Cf. declaring "racism is dead" in the U.S.. Declaring that "we've solved cultural insensitivity" is arrogant, ironically so for people who spent a lot of effort worrying about such things. Accept that we will always be considered bigoted assholes to people in the future, given enough time.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Friday March 03, @05:54PM
And consider the population of the U.S., vs that of entire other countries that are prone to cultural insensitivity. Even if it was "solved" in the U.S., it only acts as a small-ish toy example for humanity, really.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday March 03, @07:12PM
So, they're essentially doing a mass burial? Easiest way to hide mass murders? Chuck 'em in the compost pile? No more issues for law enforcement / families checking on whether that dude was murdered vs just died of natural causes. Uh, which piece, er body were we looking for again?
Then again, maybe I'm just not getting it and / or haven't researched it enough.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday March 03, @11:18PM
Personally this would be high up on the list of after-I-actually-care options. Top of the list would be one of the forensic study fields where they let bodies decompose naturally in the targeted environment, and use those bodies as control references to help improve date-of-death estimates. Providing a useful service to science while also providing nutrition to lower organisms seems like a pretty good final hurrah to me.
(Score: 3, Informative) by oumuamua on Saturday March 04, @01:55AM
I just don't like the idea of composting, but this would be neat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday March 05, @03:29AM
Fiction covered this in a movie that cost way too much to make that way too few people thought didn't suck.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience