Washington State Weighs New Option After Death: Human Composting. [View all]

[Cattledog]

By Kirk Johnson
Jan. 26, 2019

SEATTLE — Leslie Christian recently added unusual language to her living will: After death, she hoped her remains would be reduced to soil and spread around to help out some flowers, or a tree. In essence, compost.

“It seems really gentle,” said Ms. Christian, 71, a financial adviser. “Comforting and natural.”

A bill before the Washington State Legislature would make this state the first in the nation — and probably the world, legal experts said — to explicitly allow human remains to be disposed of and reduced to soil through composting, or what the bill calls recomposition.

The prospect has drawn no public opponents in the state capital as yet, but it is a concept that sometimes raises eyebrows. Funeral directors say a common reaction to the idea, which has been explored and tested in recent scientific studies, is to cringe.

“There’s almost a revulsion at times, when you talk about human composting,” said Brian Flowers, the managing funeral director at Moles Farewell Tributes, a company north of Seattle that supports the bill.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/26/us/death-human-compost.html