A Project to Turn Corpses Into Compost

New York Times ^ | 4/13/15 | CATRIN EINHORN

[Rebelbase]

It is a startling next step in the natural burial movement. Even as more people opt for interment in simple shrouds or biodegradable caskets, urban cemeteries continue to fill up. For the environmentally conscious, cremation is a problematic option, as the process releases greenhouse gases.

Armed with a prestigious environmental fellowship, Katrina Spade, a 37-year-old Seattle resident with a degree in architecture, has proposed an alternative: a facility for human composting.

The idea is attracting interest from environmental advocates and scientists. The woman laid to rest in wood chips is a first step in testing how it would work.

“Composting makes people think of banana peels and coffee grounds,” Ms. Spade said. But “our bodies have nutrients. What if we could grow new life after we’ve died?”

[Rebelbase]

Indirect Soylent Green.

[Opinionated Blowhard]

[Bubba_Leroy]

Soylent Green is people!

[Nateman]

[dp0622]

Katrina sounds like human compost.
I want my body to be oil in a few million years :)
have no idea on the accuracy of my statement, just sounded good..

[Jack Hammer]

Why can’t we encase them in modern, high strength plastic and stack them to build houses and office blocks?

[combat_boots]

I saw a man on a video/TV speaking (and who knows Holdren well). This was at the start of the present regime. The guy talked about turning people into green goo and shooting them into space.

[KarlInOhio]

Each Urban Death facility would be centered around a three-story vault that she calls “the core.” Loved ones would carry their deceased, wrapped in a shroud, up a circular ramp to the top.

[RedStateRocker]

I very much want to be buried without a casket under some grapes or marijuana or something that everyone can consume me the next year (anyone not wanting to will be left out of the will).

Waste not, want not. Nothing more stupid than pumping a body full of embalming fluid, entombing it in a piece of finished wood and then burying it; some traditions are just insane.

[dinodino]

Isn’t that called burial?

[PoloSec]

I have no doubt this will soon become a reality, it is environmentally correct until it isn’t.

[Veggie Todd]

Get the wood chipper fired up.

[rellimpank]

—Zoroaster beat them to it by several millennia—

—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism

[Red Badger]

Towers of the Dead!...............

[Jim from C-Town]

There is a reason why we embalm and why we encase in a casket and vault. Embalming preserves the body for the services. We often wait days, in some instances weeks, u\before we bury a body. A couple days of an unembalmed body and no one would ever forget that service.

In many areas, even six feet under, we will have shifting and movement of the ground. couple that with a large rain event and we have freshly buried remains shifting in the soil, even becoming exposed. In most areas even those buried in simple cardboard or shrouds require concrete vaults to keep the body in place.

Cremation becomes more and more appealing to those without a religious tradition.

[Eddie01]

Inturd

[SaveFerris]

Exactly

[moose07]

“For the environmentally conscious, cremation is a problematic option, as the process releases greenhouse gases.”

Okay, Decomposition produces amongst other things:

carbon dioxide
hydrogen sulphide,
ammonia
methane
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_process_of_decomposition

[EQAndyBuzz]

At high temps there will be no greenhouse gas emitted. And even if there was, it is CO2 which plants would breathe.

[I want the USA back]

Stupid. Burial is done the way it is to stop the spread of disease, and to give survivors a place that they can visit.