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ENC 1102

13 April 2023

What's the best way to die

What is the best way to die? This is a fairly odd question, a better way of putting it would

be what would you want to happen to your body after you die? This is a question that eventually

all people ask themselves at one point or another. Most end up going with cremation or a

traditional burial/funeral, but what if there was a better option? This research paper dives deep

into why people choose each option and attempts to provide a better solution, human

composting. Using your loved ones as fertilizer instead of having a traditional funeral at first

sounds crazy but when taking a closer look at it the idea is actually genius. While funerals

remain the societal norm, People should consider human composting over other forms of death

rituals because It is better for the environment, It is cheaper than a funeral, and it is a creative

and lasting way of honoring the dead. This is an important topic because people are dying every

day and which means every day someone is being burned or buried but now there is another

option.

Now first let's look at the history behind funerals and why they seem to be the choice that

many people choose. Before the caskets that we use today, we first used coffins and have been

using them for thousands of years, the oldest dating back to over 3000 years ago. The difference

between caskets and coffins is very subtle with caskets being rectangular and coffins being

hexagonal, and casket doors have no hinge so they just come off, unlike caskets. Coffins were
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used to protect the body and allow it to decay naturally without interference from bacteria in the

ground. In an article titled Why Do We Use Coffins?, Tim N says that “in Medieval Europe,

coffins were widely used to deter scavengers and graverobbers. If a body wasn't buried deeply

enough, scavenger animals like foxes might dig into the ground to get to the body”(Tim N). As

you can see the coffin was also used as a shield against animals and even people, this is also

where we get the ritual of burying people deep underground. Americans didn’t use coffins until

the 1800s. During The Civil War, there was a lot of death it is known as the deadliest war

America has ever been in, The article Civil War Casualties by Americans Battlefield Trust states

that over 620,000 people died in that war, which at the time was 2% of the population, in today’s

standards that would be roughly 2million(Americans Battlefield Trust). Because of all this death

there needed to be a way to transport bodies back to their families safely without spreading

disease. This was the perfect job for the casket, these also allowed bodies to be lowered easily

into the ground so this is when their popularity skyrocketed. Another article By Tim N called the

history of Caskets in America said that as the war went on “The war's violence and the high

numbers of death cause the effect commonly known as “the beautification of death” …People

would try to take some distance from death, changing the coffin's name and shape as an attempt

to make death less painful”(The History of Caskets, Tim N). This movement is why they

changed the name to the casket and changed the shape to a square. And to be honest this is the

reason people still have funerals today, because of tradition, because we’ve been doing it since

the 1800s and because it was used to honor the death of soldiers today it is seen as a tradition to

honor the dead.

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Cremation has been around for thousands of years, even longer than funerals have been

but the reason why people get them today isn’t because of tradition. There are 3 main reasons

people get cremations are because of cost, versatility, and environmental effect. When looking at

cost it is clear to see why people pick cremations over funerals, a study done by the Nationals

Funeral Director Association says that the median cost for a funeral is $7,848 while the median

cost of a funeral with cremation was around $6,971(NFDA). This difference doesn’t look that

big but that’s because this cremation also includes and funeral. When looking at just the

cremation the article Cremation vs. Burial: Why People Choose One Over the Other by the

Philadelphia Cremation Society it says “the average cost of a basic cremation minus any frills

such as visiting hours or memorial service is about $2,500”. Now, this is a huge difference with

funerals being over 3 times as expensive. Cremation is also versatile because it allows the ashes

to be turned into jewelry, kept in an urn or they can take the ashes and spread them where ever

they like. The other biggest reason that people choose cremation is the environmental benefits.

Typical funerals have the body in a casket and often times before they are put into the ground

they will open the casket so that people can see the body one last time. What a lot of people don’t

know is that there was a whole process to get that body there and looking like that. Before the

viewing, the body is pumped full of chemicals such as formaldehyde, phenol, and menthol which

all are toxic to the environment. The article Why Conventional Burial Harms the Environment

by Milton Fields says that “It’s estimated that 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde are placed in the

ground each year due to conventional burials.”(Milton Fields). On top of chemicals funerals also

use a lot of materials such as wood. It is stated that “In just one year, the amount of casket wood

buried is equivalent to about 4 million acres of forest.”(Milton Fields). This goes to show the
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amount of an environmental impact that funerals have. Now since it's not chopping down trees or

putting chemicals into the ground cremation is advertised as being better for the environment but

just because it's better doesn’t mean it's good. Our bodies are carbon-based, which means that

every part of our body is partly made up of carbon so when our body is burned all that carbon is

released as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Clearly, this is a huge problem, also cremation

requires fuel as well which is more pollutants in the air. The National Geographic article The

environmental toll of cremating the dead by Becky Little says cremation“takes up about the same

amount of energy and has the same emissions as about two tanks of gas in an average

car”(Little). These articles are good representations of how damaging cremations and funerals

can be for the environment. Even people who perform the cremation think it's a bad idea. When

listening to the informational podcast Science Vs there is an episode titled Should We Compost

Human Bodies, and here Wendy Zukerman speaks to a woman that works at a cremation site and

she says “I would do anything to any of my family members except cremation”(Zukerman). This

lady also talks about the process of cremation and how when burying the bodies things like gold

teeth or metal in the body get burned as well and that when she opens the box she would be

covered in the smoke from the bodies, and that even she would have the smell stuck in her

nostrils when she came home(Zukerman). This obviously isn’t safe for anyone to be breathing in

these chemicals all day and it isn’t safe for us to be pumping them into the atmosphere all day.

So then what should people do if they aren’t going to get a cremation or a funeral, that's

where human composting comes in. Human composting this the method of breaking down the

human body into soil, but how does this work, and what even is composting? Composting is the

process of recycling organic matter(organic matter being basically anything living or once
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living). When living things die bacteria and fungi will come along and decompose the matter.

What is left over from this decomposition is what we call soil. Wendy Zukerman explains that

little bacterial microbes release chemicals that break down whatever organic material there is and

the bi-product of that is soil(Zukerman). In order for these microbes to work they need an

environment of heat moisture and oxygen, without something like oxygen the material will

undergo something called anaerobic decomposition which is harmful to the environment because

it releases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. But with near-perfect conditions, the

microbes will start to break down the material extremely quickly, and that's what core

composting is, creating an environment such that microbes can quickly break down organic

matter. Breaking down this matter puts nutrients back into the soil, the Natural Resources

Defense Council(NRDC) released an article titled Composting 101 and it said that “Compost

contains three primary nutrients needed by garden crops: nitrogen, phosphorus, and

potassium…Instead of relying on synthetic fertilizers that contain harmful chemicals,

composting offers an organic alternative”(NRDC). Examples of things that are normally

composted are fruit and vegetable leftovers, food leftovers, eggshells, teabags, and even

sometimes newspapers. Composting 101 and Should We Compost Human Bodies provided good

background knowledge on composting and its effects.

Now you might be wondering, can humans even be composted, well the solution to this

question came with an interesting story. On the Science Vs podcast, Zukerman interviewed a

woman named Katrina Spade and she spoke about a story that she heard about a farmer

composting whole cows. This sparked an idea in the head of Spade and she thought, if you can

compost cows then you should be able to compost humans(Zukerman). This idea makes sense
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since composting is just a sped-up decomposition of organic materials then humans should be

able to be composted just like cows or any other animal. This Idea soon became a pilot study and

Spade found 7 people that would donate their bodies after their death. The way this worked is the

body would be laid in a box along with a mix of alfalfa, straw, and wood chips and the pod

would be regulated by people checking things like moisture and oxygen levels, after a month

everything would be turned into dirt. The only thing left would be the bones since they are harder

to break down so they would have a machine to crush the bones and add them back to the mix

for another few months. People were obviously skeptical about the idea of it and asked questions

like Is this dirt safe and what will happen if the person dies of disease? Well, Zukerman speaks to

a man named Thomas Bass who is a livestock environment associate specialist and he says that

when the microbes are breaking down the material they produce a lot of heat and they found data

that says when the temperature is hot enough over a period of time that this environment will kill

off most pathogens(Zukerman). They even tell a story of how a farmer had thousands of

chickens to get the bird flu so he ended up composting all of them. But just to be safe Spades

crew tests the samples to see if anything has survived. The second concern was just curious of

what it was like. Zukerman meets Micah Truman the CEO of Return Home which is a human

composting business and she herself looks takes a look at the inside of a box where someone has

been composted. She says that she was surprised that it did smell weird or feel any different than

normal dirt. That is because dirt is just the broken-down remains of organic matter. What remains

is 250 lbs of fertilized soil and it can be used for anything. This is part of the versatility as well.

Like cremation, soil can be taken to a field and spread the same way ashes are. And with such

fertile soil, it can also be used to grow plants like trees and flowers in honor of their loved ones.
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With 250lbs of soil, it can be divided up amongst family members allowing them to do whatever

they want with the soil whether that's spreading it somewhere or using it to grow a plant.

Now the only thing left to ask is do people even want to do this? There are many people

that care about the environment and those feelings extend to death as well. The NFDA’s reports

say “According to NFDA’s 2022 Consumer Awareness and Preferences Report, 60.5% would be

interested in exploring “green” funeral options because of their potential environmental benefits,

cost savings or for some other reason”. This is a very important statistic, it shows that there is a

serious market for this kind of technology. And with learning that cremation the

“environment-friendly” option actually hurts the environment, people will be looking for a

better, cleaner option. This idea is further reinforced by something known as the Green Death

Movement. The environmentalist Cat Baklarz in the article Green Death: A Hipster

Phenomenon? Better Burial Marketing for The Death Industry explains that the way this

movement started was

“political and social changes in the early 2000s propelled hipster culture from a

characteristically ‘grunge’ phase to “green” or “primitive” hipsterism that values liberal

political environmentalism, customization and “rebel consumerism.” These newer

millennial and Generation Z hipsters constitute a culture of consumers who inadvertently

re-imagine “purchasing the products of authority… as a defiance of authority”(Baklarz)

She is saying that the upcoming generations adopted the environmentalist ideals of the ones

before us but on a greater scale. She goes on to talk about how the idea at first will be challenged

by society the same way cremation was in the ’60s but now it's even more popular than funerals.
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Spade experienced this when she found out that it was actually illegal to compost human bodies

and that is when she went to court and made it legal to practice it in her state and many other

states. She went on to create her own company called Recompose and on their website it says

that their process uses 87% less energy than cremation and that they also used donated soil

remains to help rebuild forests (Recompose). This fills the void in the market that is left for

people that want a cleaner way to honor the dead.

Readers of my paper should care about this topic because they too will eventually be

making this decision for themselves and maybe even someone else. No one can escape death so

why not do it in a way that doesn’t harm the planet. This research paper is dedicated to learning

about human composting and presenting it as the best option over funerals and cremation.

People should greatly consider human composting over other forms of death rituals because It is

better for the environment, It is cheaper than a funeral, and it is a creative and lasting way of

honoring the dead.

Work cited

Georgia, Milton Fields. “Why Conventional Burial Harms the Environment.” Milton

Fields, 31 Dec. 2019,

N, Tim. “Why Do We Use Coffins?” Trusted Caskets, 28 Jan. 2022,

trustedcaskets.com/blogs/news/why-do-we-use-coffins#:~:text=Some%20of%20the%20oldest%

20dates,the%20body%20and%20the%20ground.
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N, Tim. “The Story of Caskets in America.” Trusted Caskets, 11 Feb. 2022,

trustedcaskets.com/blogs/news/history-of-caskets-in-america.

Little, Becky. “The Environmental Toll of Cremating the Dead.” Science, 3 May 2021,

www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/is-cremation-environmentally-friendly-heres-the-sc

ience?loggedin=true&rnd=1679611929786.

Society, Philadelphia Cremation. “Cremation Vs. Burial: Why People Choose One Over

the Other.” Philadelphia Cremation Society, 20 Sept. 2021,

www.cremationsocietyofphiladelphia.com/cremation-vs-burial.

“Composting 101.” NRDC, 20 July 2020, www.nrdc.org/stories/composting-101.

Should We Compost Human Bodies. season 1, Spotify, 6 Oct. 2022. Spotify,

open.spotify.com/episode/6reXXkhnvGxpSvnCz8wP2c?si=Eh_NkcXVR6WWkyxEDnsIYg.

Statistics. nfda.org/news/statistics.

Baklarz, Cat. “Green Death: A Hipster Phenomenon? Better Burial Marketing for the

Death Industry.” Medium, 14 Dec. 2021,

medium.com/age-of-awareness/green-death-a-hipster-phenomenon-better-burial-

marketing-helps-revolutionize-the-death-industry-42b03b4c16f9.

“Our Model | Recompose.” Recompose, 4 Apr. 2023, recompose.life/our-model.

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