Image inspiration - René Magritte - link
Earth Funeral has recently opened what it describes as the first human composting facility on the US East Coast. Located in Maryland, the facility uses a process known rather more elegantly as Natural Organic Reduction (NOR), in which human remains are placed inside individual vessels with organic bulking materials and subjected to controlled aerobic decomposition.
Temperature, moisture, oxygen and airflow are managed to encourage microbial activity in much the same way as other controlled composting processes. Maryland regulations require the material within the vessel to reach at least 55°C for 72 consecutive hours as part of the pathogen reduction process with 'transformation' taking up to 45 days. There are currently fewer vessels installed but the facility is ultimately designed to accommodate 126, with a projected capacity of around 2,000 people each year.
Strange though the concept may initially sound, there's a serious environmental argument behind it. Traditional burial requires land and can involve coffins, embalming chemicals and maintained cemetery infrastructure. Cremation avoids many of those issues but requires considerable energy and produces carbon emissions. Natural Organic Reduction offers another option: controlled biological decomposition returning the organic material to soil.
It's easy to cringe at the idea but strip away our cultural relationship with death and the underlying biological principle is hardly revolutionary. Human beings are organic matter and decomposition happens eventually regardless of what funeral arrangements we make. NOR simply controls and accelerates that process.
Environmental claims do, however, deserve scrutiny. Earth describes its process as having zero net CO₂ emissions, largely because its vessels operate using renewable electricity and because carbon released through decomposition is regarded as part of the short-term biogenic carbon cycle rather than additional fossil carbon. That doesn't mean the process produces no emissions. Earth's own scientific information acknowledges that approximately 30–40% of the organic carbon in the body is converted to carbon dioxide through microbial respiration during decomposition.
An independent comparative life cycle assessment undertaken for Dutch funeral organisation DELA estimated the climate impact of human composting at approximately 47 kg CO₂e per person which placed it almost alongside electric cremation at 45 kg CO₂e and natural burial at 40 kg CO₂e, although substantially below gas cremation at 181 kg CO₂e. NOR may therefore represent a comparatively low-carbon option, but perhaps not quite the environmental miracle some headlines suggest. Maryland has specifically created a regulatory framework for Natural Organic Reduction as a method for the final disposition of human remains. Earth isn't operating a conventional waste management or composting facility and the deceased aren't classified as waste. Operationally, however, things begin to look remarkably familiar to anyone who has spent time around biological waste treatment facilities.
There are acceptance criteria, prohibited inputs, controlled treatment vessels, organic bulking agents, defined residence periods, temperature requirements, moisture controls, pathogen controls, odour controls, record keeping and restrictions governing the resulting material. The facility must even operate under a formal Reduction Facility Operations Plan covering the movement of material through receipt, active reduction, curing and storage.
Maryland regulations prohibit NOR where somebody is known or reasonably suspected to have certain conditions, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or another prion disease, Ebola or tuberculosis. Certain radioactive treatments can also prevent acceptance. Battery-powered implanted devices such as pacemakers and defibrillators must be removed, with operators required to check remains using a hand magnet or metal-detection equipment.
Legally, it isn't waste treatment. Operationally, however, an awful lot of it would be instantly recognisable to somebody auditing a biological treatment facility. Once the process has been successfully completed, the legal status changes. What entered the vessel as human remains emerges as what Maryland legislation describes as soil remains. Earth says each person produces approximately 113 kg of soil like material. For an individual family this creates a rather beautiful proposition - take the soil home, plant a tree, establish a memorial garden, scatter it somewhere meaningful (with the landowner's permission) and the person quite literally contributes to new life.
However, multiply the numbers - at Earth's projected Maryland capacity, 2,000 people × 113 kg produces approximately 226 tonnes of material every year and the question inevitably arises: where does it all go?
Maryland places significant restrictions on NOR soil. It cannot be sold or resold, incorporated into commercial compost, used to grow food intended for humans or livestock or simply placed on somebody else's land without permission. Perfectly sensible safeguards but those restrictions also remove several of the obvious large-scale markets normally available to recovered organic material.
Strange though the concept may initially sound, there's a serious environmental argument behind it. Traditional burial requires land and can involve coffins, embalming chemicals and maintained cemetery infrastructure. Cremation avoids many of those issues but requires considerable energy and produces carbon emissions. Natural Organic Reduction offers another option: controlled biological decomposition returning the organic material to soil.
It's easy to cringe at the idea but strip away our cultural relationship with death and the underlying biological principle is hardly revolutionary. Human beings are organic matter and decomposition happens eventually regardless of what funeral arrangements we make. NOR simply controls and accelerates that process.
Environmental claims do, however, deserve scrutiny. Earth describes its process as having zero net CO₂ emissions, largely because its vessels operate using renewable electricity and because carbon released through decomposition is regarded as part of the short-term biogenic carbon cycle rather than additional fossil carbon. That doesn't mean the process produces no emissions. Earth's own scientific information acknowledges that approximately 30–40% of the organic carbon in the body is converted to carbon dioxide through microbial respiration during decomposition.
An independent comparative life cycle assessment undertaken for Dutch funeral organisation DELA estimated the climate impact of human composting at approximately 47 kg CO₂e per person which placed it almost alongside electric cremation at 45 kg CO₂e and natural burial at 40 kg CO₂e, although substantially below gas cremation at 181 kg CO₂e. NOR may therefore represent a comparatively low-carbon option, but perhaps not quite the environmental miracle some headlines suggest. Maryland has specifically created a regulatory framework for Natural Organic Reduction as a method for the final disposition of human remains. Earth isn't operating a conventional waste management or composting facility and the deceased aren't classified as waste. Operationally, however, things begin to look remarkably familiar to anyone who has spent time around biological waste treatment facilities.
There are acceptance criteria, prohibited inputs, controlled treatment vessels, organic bulking agents, defined residence periods, temperature requirements, moisture controls, pathogen controls, odour controls, record keeping and restrictions governing the resulting material. The facility must even operate under a formal Reduction Facility Operations Plan covering the movement of material through receipt, active reduction, curing and storage.
Maryland regulations prohibit NOR where somebody is known or reasonably suspected to have certain conditions, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or another prion disease, Ebola or tuberculosis. Certain radioactive treatments can also prevent acceptance. Battery-powered implanted devices such as pacemakers and defibrillators must be removed, with operators required to check remains using a hand magnet or metal-detection equipment.
Legally, it isn't waste treatment. Operationally, however, an awful lot of it would be instantly recognisable to somebody auditing a biological treatment facility. Once the process has been successfully completed, the legal status changes. What entered the vessel as human remains emerges as what Maryland legislation describes as soil remains. Earth says each person produces approximately 113 kg of soil like material. For an individual family this creates a rather beautiful proposition - take the soil home, plant a tree, establish a memorial garden, scatter it somewhere meaningful (with the landowner's permission) and the person quite literally contributes to new life.
However, multiply the numbers - at Earth's projected Maryland capacity, 2,000 people × 113 kg produces approximately 226 tonnes of material every year and the question inevitably arises: where does it all go?
Maryland places significant restrictions on NOR soil. It cannot be sold or resold, incorporated into commercial compost, used to grow food intended for humans or livestock or simply placed on somebody else's land without permission. Perfectly sensible safeguards but those restrictions also remove several of the obvious large-scale markets normally available to recovered organic material.
Earth allows families to take soil remains and says material families don't want can be donated for uses including tree planting, habitat restoration and conservation projects. At current volumes that may provide an entirely satisfactory solution but what happens if human composting succeeds and scales up? One facility producing around 226 tonnes annually may be manageable - ten facilities could produce more than 2,000 tonnes. If 100,000 people eventually chose NOR nationally, the process could potentially create around 11,300 tonnes of material every year and at that point, planting a memorial rose stops being an end-market strategy and this is where human composting encounters exactly the same fundamental challenge conventional recycling has faced for decades.
Producing a recoverable material does not automatically create a circular economy. For a circular system to work, somebody ultimately has to have a genuine, sustainable and lawful use for what comes out of the other end. Human composting therefore presents an unusual paradox. Its environmental proposition is partly based upon producing useful soil rather than consuming energy through cremation or occupying land through conventional burial. But the more successful the process becomes, the more soil it produces and the more important reliable outlets for that soil become. A few kilograms kept by a grieving family has enormous sentimental value. Hundreds or thousands of tonnes require an end market.
None of this means human composting is a bad idea — quite the opposite. The technology is fascinating, the regulatory framework developing around it is surprisingly sophisticated and there is a perfectly credible argument that controlled biological decomposition could become another legitimate alternative to burial and cremation.
A facility capable of treating 2,000 people annually has throughput, capacity, emissions, storage requirements, process controls and outputs. Those things don't disappear because the material entering the vessel has a name rather than a waste code. Perhaps Natural Organic Reduction will prove to be one of the more environmentally sustainable ways of dealing with the unavoidable reality of death but sustainability cannot be judged solely by what happens to the person entering the vessel. We also have to ask what happens to everything leaving it. Earth Funeral - link - More like this (composting) - link - more like this (Maryland) - link
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