Composting has become a staple in cities and towns all across America and around the world for quite a few years now, but human composting? The thought of it lines up in the "Things That Make You Go Hmm…" category. Yet, someone is building an infrastructure to begin doing just that: Composting. Humans. The cleverly ambitious college grad behind the invention is Katrina Spade and her Urban Death Project.
"I've always been someone who appreciated composting and, actually, more broadly, the process of decomposition and how it is underappreciated, but really crucial to our survival, the process that happens," Spade said. "When I was in graduate school for architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I sort of had this epiphany where one day I realized I was going to die someday. And when that happened, I just started to become curious about what my non-religious family would do with my body when I died."
With this heavy question in hand, Spade dug deep for a resolution.
"I researched the options that most of us have, and the pros and cons of each. And the main options we have in the U.S. are: conventional burial, cremation and natural burial. I found that conventional burial and cremation were really lacking for me, both from an environmental standpoint and from an emotional standpoint; they didn't have any particular meaning, and they seemed pretty random, actually," Spade said.
In her research, Spade discovered that farmers in the United States have been composting livestock—entire cows, pigs, sheep and horses—when they died and, for whatever reason, weren't able to make it to the slaughterhouse floor.
"I thought, 'Oh, my goodness. If you can compost a 2,000-pound deer, surely you can compost a human being.' I was in architecture school, I was thinking about design, and the human experience of moving through spaces and what we need in order to grieve, in order to say goodbye to someone we love. And so I basically took the science of the livestock composting, and then created a system and a space specifically for our cities—although it doesn't have to be—where all of that could happen for humans," she said.
Still, not everyone wants to sit and talk about ( or quietly mull over the possibility ) of death.
"Well, it's nice to think about it ahead of time. It's really hard if you have an older family member, it can be kind of awkward to say, 'Hey, what do you want us to do with your body when you die?' And the older we get, maybe the harder it is to talk about, in fact," she said.
To be clear, human composting is not burial. The deceased is stored in a refrigerated space for up to 10 days before the ceremony takes place. There is no embalming because decomposition is an important part of the design. After the ceremony takes place with loved ones close by, staff members assist the family in shrouding their loved one's body in a simple linen, that is then accompanied by a "laying-in" process.
"I describe the process of accelerated natural decomposition because of the addition of carbon materials," Spade said. "If you bury a body by itself in the ground, natural decomposition will occur. It won't be as fast as if you bury it in wood chips, which is essentially what I'm proposing. And that's because with wood chips, you're creating a perfect environment to let the microbes and beneficial bacteria do their job. There's more air and there's a lot of carbon."
When pressed on how the process worked alongside preserving the environment, Spade said, "In the U.S. every year, we produce enough emissions from cremation that we create the equivalent of 70,000 cars driving the road for an entire year. Cremation requires a lot of fossil fuels, and it does create emissions as well. It's certainly not the worst thing—I mean, we go around polluting all the time, so I try not to overemphasize the environmental aspect of this, because I do think that if cremation is meaningful, then by all means you should have that. In fact, if conventional burial is meaningful, I also think people should go for that option. We pollute all the time, so to tell someone they shouldn't have this option, because they're going to bury some hardwood underground and put some carcinogenic fluid in there too, I think that would be a little hypocritical of me; but there are environmental repercussions to both."
Spade started a crowdfunding campaign in order to make her dream of human composting a reality. Her Urban Death Project is a registered 501( c )( 3 ) and operates out of Seattle, Washington.
"I'm proposing building facilities in U.S. cities that would function as funeral homes legally, and that would also be places of non-secular sacredness," she said. "I picture it as a combination of a museum, a church and a library; where it has these different functions as a system—a very practical system for turning our dead into compost—but it's also a place where you might come and look at the gardens and imagine and realize that people have died and their bodies are now growing these beautiful flowers and beautiful trees on site."
One of the rewards via the project's Kickstarter campaign is a spot in one of the organization's first gardens.
"[Supporters] can go to our Kickstarter campaign where one of the rewards is actually a place in a future core. It's at the $2,500 level, so it's a significant contribution. I'm going to meet all the people that choose that level, because I'm considering them to be, really, the first cohorts that say yes, we definitely want this to happen. And I want to meet with them and know what kinds of things are meaningful to them," she explained.
For now, cities are the main focus, but Spade isn't ruling out the possibility of expanding her concept to Middle America.
"I conceived the Urban Death Project because of the need in cities for a place to do this, because our city cemeteries are filling up, and also because I think there's something beautiful about bringing nature into the city in a deeper way. But there's no reason that this has to be only urban, and it could take different forms depending on the location," she said. "One of the main goals is for different designers and architects to design each of these facilities. They should not look the same from one to another. They should really be about the community in which they're residing."
Besides death and decomposition, Spade likes to have fun. No, really, she does.
"One of my favorite sports is badminton—to play, not to watch," she said.
Find out more about Katrina Spade and the Urban Death Project, visit www.urbandeathproject.org .
