The Dirt on Human Composting

I was one of those kids who was always rearranging my bedroom furniture and creating extensive forts in the woods where I grew up in rural New Hampshire.

After years of thinking design would only be a hobby, I started looking at it as a possible career. Of all the things I learned when I finally went to architecture school, perhaps the most enduring lesson is this: Design is everywhere.

Design isn’t just the realm of architects. It’s in everything we do, whether we like it or not. Almost every decision we make is a design decision in some way.

Hate fashion and decide to wear the most basic clothes possible? That is a design choice.

Don’t care about fonts, so you use Comic Sans? Yep, still a design choice.

Not caring about something doesn’t make it go away. Even unintentionality is a decision we make.

Why does this matter? Because every design decision we make, the good, the bad, the ugly and the unintentional, makes people feel a certain way.

The best example I’ve seen of this phenomenon is in the sounds and lighting of hospitals. Many of you are very familiar with those sounds and that lighting.

Imagine being sick in a hospital bed. Then imagine being assaulted by high-pitched beeps every few minutes. Imagine the lighting overhead is harsh and fluorescent.

Did someone along the way say, “Let’s make bad sound and bad lighting part of the patient experience”?

Hopefully not. Probably not.

But now your hospital stay, and potentially even the end of your life, is deeply affected by these choices.

A few years ago, here at End Well, I heard a talk by sound designer Yoko Sen. She spoke about redesigning the sounds of hospitals. She spoke about making them harmonious.

Now imagine lying in a hospital bed and hearing gentle, melodious tones. Imagine the light is soft.

There is so much potential to redesign our end-of-life spaces.

My name is Katrina Spade, and I am a designer. I’m also the founder and CEO of Recompose, the company responsible for a new form of deathcare called human composting.

Recompose and our work offering human composting are part of a broad movement to redesign the end-of-life experience. At the heart of this movement is the undying belief that design matters deeply.

About 10 years ago, I became obsessed with the idea of composting human beings. It happens, you know.

I was in graduate school for architecture and contemplating my own mortality, like everyone in this room is doing today. I noticed that all of the design decisions that had gone into the conventional funeral industry over time had managed to create something both uninspiring and polluting.

I dove into the design challenge of creating an alternative to cremation and burial. Those two conventional practices account for a staggering amount of pollution and waste.

I started by studying the practice of natural burial, and I deemed it to be a practically perfect solution.

Natural burial is practiced all over the world and has been for millennia. It’s where a body is placed directly in the ground with either a shroud or a pine box and allowed to return to nature.

In the United States, natural burial is having a slow but profound resurgence after centuries of embalming fluid, metal caskets and concrete grave liners.

But here’s the thing: Natural burial requires plenty of land. So I see it as a perfect solution for our rural locations.

The edges of my design challenge sharpened. What would be the option for our dead in cities that would connect us to nature and benefit, rather than harm, the planet?

It was right around then that my friend Kate called me on the phone to tell me about a practice called livestock mortality composting.

Boom. That was it. My design inspiration had landed, and I was off.

Composting is an awesome process. I hope many of you out there are already aware of that. And if you aren’t yet, someday, join the cult of composting.

Some say composting is one of the earliest forms of biomimicry. Biomimicry is using nature as inspiration for our designs.

Composting mimics the process shown here on the forest floor, as dead organic material, sticks, leaves and your errant chipmunk, decompose naturally.

I know, “deceased chipmunk.” Sometimes in practice, I would say “deceased chipmunk,” but I was like, do you say “deceased” about a chipmunk? I don’t know. But I am talking about a dead chipmunk here.

All of that dead organic material is decomposing to form the basis of all life on Earth, which is soil.

There is a key difference, though, between composting and what you see here. Composting is managed by humans. It’s a system. It’s tended to.

We humans create the perfect environment for nature to do its job. Then naturally occurring microbes and bacteria do all the rest.

It’s pretty magical.

You’re looking at an array of Recompose composting vessels in a space that we call the Greenhouse. Inside each one, a body is transforming from human to soil.

My team and I spent years designing these vessels, and we considered every aspect. Their purpose is to join biology and ritual, function and meaning.

I sometimes call them a spa for the dead.

Here’s how human composting works.

We lay a carefully calibrated mixture of wood chips, alfalfa and straw inside the vessel. You can think of those plant materials as the equivalent of the sticks and leaves on the forest floor.

We lay a person’s body on top of that mixture and cover it with more of the same. The body is really cocooned inside the vessel and the plant material.

We have a basic fan system that pulls air through each vessel. Air is critical to the process. This is an aerobic process, and oxygen is required.

We have two temperature probes that tell our team how warm the material is getting inside the vessel. That warmth is due to the microbial activity happening inside.

Then, about once a week, we slowly rotate each vessel, ensuring, like any good composting process, that everything is mixed well and that air and microbes reach everywhere.

Time is a really interesting concept when it comes to natural processes.

When you’re taking a hike and find a fallen log in the woods, you probably know it will decompose. But you would be hard-pressed to say, “It will decompose on this exact date.”

Human composting is similar.

At Recompose, we know it takes between 30 and 40 days for a body to transform into soil. We know it takes another few weeks for that soil to cure.

But we try to embrace the fact that nature isn’t precise. It doesn’t have a deadline. It definitely doesn’t wear a watch.

At Recompose, we work with our clients to help them understand this very special aspect of time. We want them to know that composting their loved one is very different from, say, cremation, which takes just a matter of hours to complete.

One of my favorite stories from Recompose is about a person named Wayne. He was a Seattle resident and an avid gardener.

When Wayne died, his body was brought to Recompose. Several months later, his sister came to pick up his soil.

Because we use so much plant material to compost each body, we create about a cubic yard of soil per person. That’s enough to fill the bed of a pickup truck.

In Marie’s case, she brought a trailer to our facility. She met our staff, the people who had tended to her brother’s transformation. Together, they filled up the trailer.

She drove to the neighborhood where Wayne had lived for much of his life. Wayne’s friends and neighbors came with five-gallon buckets, and they all took some of Wayne’s soil home to their gardens.

I like to think of them all gardening together, friends and neighbors with Wayne still.

To me, the process of transforming our dead into nutrient-rich compost is reverent at its core.

What could be more respectful to the people we love than to leave them the gift of new life after we’ve died?

What could be more respectful than to send their bodies off to become soil, to nourish nature in the city and rejoin the natural ecosystem?

At Recompose, we believe that this new form of deathcare is creating opportunities for new forms of ritual to emerge as well.

This is an image of the Gathering Space and a ceremony we call the Laying In. The event joins together the ritual and the practical, and religious and cultural traditions are often woven throughout.

During a Laying In, the person’s body is wrapped in a linen shroud and placed on the cradle. Friends and family place wood chips, alfalfa and straw on and around the body.

Sometimes they place flowers. Sometimes moss from a favorite hiking spot. In one case, purple onions and red bell peppers from their person’s garden.

I love that one.

At the end of the Laying In, the body is placed into the Threshold Vessel.

The Threshold Vessel is a doorway from the Gathering Space to the Greenhouse, where the active composting occurs.

Passing your person’s body through the Threshold Vessel marks their transition from living family member to ancestor. It begins their physical transformation from human to soil.

It has been incredible for my team and me to see the family and friends of our clients create new rituals to honor their dead. It has underscored the fact that design is everywhere.

Every single action, laying moss, singing a hymn, placing your hands on that person’s body one last time, matters deeply.

When our team designed the Threshold Vessel, we knew that every single aspect of its design could matter as well.

Obsessing over its design became like a gift we could give to the people who would someday experience it.

There is a poem cut into the top of the Threshold Vessel. You can just see it there.

I like to think of it as a poem for the dead to read on their way through. It was written by a staff member at Recompose, and it says:

“Let us not live in fear of decomposing, but in awe and gratitude of our future recomposing.”

Thank you so much.