Post by barb43 on Oct 3, 2022 16:10:25 GMT
Here's a new idea to consider:
Inside One of the World's 1st Human Composting Facilities
Death is a part of life at Return Home, where families grieve and bodies become soil.
Rachel Gerberding has a green thumb. So when her mother died this April, Gerberding decided to compost her. Gerberding, who lives in Washington state in a house surrounded by flowers, had heard about a newly legal method to turn human remains into soil. “I was like, ‘Mom, it would be such a wonderful thing for me — to be able to just walk through [my garden] and be like, ‘Oh, hi, Mom,’” Gerberding, 48, said, recounting their conversation. Sharon Gerberding, who had previously planned on a simple cremation, agreed: “I’m going to be dead,” she told Rachel. “Do whatever you want!”
That’s why Sharon, who died from complications of multiple sclerosis, was laid to rest in an industrial park 30 minutes south of Seattle. On a chilly spring day, her family gathered in a nondescript, hangar-style building tucked between a belt rubber warehouse, recycling facilities, and an air quality testing company. Staff had placed Sharon’s body in a vessel filled with alfalfa, straw, sawdust, and notes written in biodegradable ink. Hymns played over the speaker system, a tribute to Sharon’s membership in the Church of Latter Day Saints. By early summer, all that would be left of their matriarch was a few hundred pounds of rich, dark soil.
This is natural organic reduction — better known as human composting — the first truly new form of final disposition developed in decades. First legalized in Washington state in 2019, the process has proved popular with certain of the Pacific Northwest’s eco-conscious consumers, who are eager to have their last act on earth be a positive one. They know that traditional burials involve literal tons of steel, concrete, and toxic chemicals and that the heat of a cremation retort emits several hundred pounds of carbon into the atmosphere. For families like the Gerberdings, natural organic reduction, or NOR, promises a more gentle way out.
NOR is now legal in California, Oregon, Colorado, and Vermont. Boosters hope New York is next. But death industry disruptors face opposition, including from the Catholic Church, which has deemed NOR “more appropriate for vegetable trimmings and eggshells than for human bodies.” They aren’t the only ones: plenty of people find the whole process a little creepy.
www.theverge.com/c/23307867/human-composting-process-return-home
Inside One of the World's 1st Human Composting Facilities
Death is a part of life at Return Home, where families grieve and bodies become soil.
Rachel Gerberding has a green thumb. So when her mother died this April, Gerberding decided to compost her. Gerberding, who lives in Washington state in a house surrounded by flowers, had heard about a newly legal method to turn human remains into soil. “I was like, ‘Mom, it would be such a wonderful thing for me — to be able to just walk through [my garden] and be like, ‘Oh, hi, Mom,’” Gerberding, 48, said, recounting their conversation. Sharon Gerberding, who had previously planned on a simple cremation, agreed: “I’m going to be dead,” she told Rachel. “Do whatever you want!”
That’s why Sharon, who died from complications of multiple sclerosis, was laid to rest in an industrial park 30 minutes south of Seattle. On a chilly spring day, her family gathered in a nondescript, hangar-style building tucked between a belt rubber warehouse, recycling facilities, and an air quality testing company. Staff had placed Sharon’s body in a vessel filled with alfalfa, straw, sawdust, and notes written in biodegradable ink. Hymns played over the speaker system, a tribute to Sharon’s membership in the Church of Latter Day Saints. By early summer, all that would be left of their matriarch was a few hundred pounds of rich, dark soil.
This is natural organic reduction — better known as human composting — the first truly new form of final disposition developed in decades. First legalized in Washington state in 2019, the process has proved popular with certain of the Pacific Northwest’s eco-conscious consumers, who are eager to have their last act on earth be a positive one. They know that traditional burials involve literal tons of steel, concrete, and toxic chemicals and that the heat of a cremation retort emits several hundred pounds of carbon into the atmosphere. For families like the Gerberdings, natural organic reduction, or NOR, promises a more gentle way out.
NOR is now legal in California, Oregon, Colorado, and Vermont. Boosters hope New York is next. But death industry disruptors face opposition, including from the Catholic Church, which has deemed NOR “more appropriate for vegetable trimmings and eggshells than for human bodies.” They aren’t the only ones: plenty of people find the whole process a little creepy.
www.theverge.com/c/23307867/human-composting-process-return-home
