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Human Compost

Tucker301

Groundskeeper
Banned !
Feb 13, 2015
9,494
23,355
Southern VA
https://www.apnews.com/65306ba86c24482baed58e7c0c2e39d7


Washington is 1st state to allow composting of human bodies
By GENE JOHNSONyesterday


Katrina Spade
1 of 3
FILE - In this April 19, 2019, file photo, Katrina Spade, the founder and CEO of Recompose, a company that hopes to use composting as an alternative to burying or cremating human remains, poses for a photo in a cemetery in Seattle, as she displays a sample of compost material left from the decomposition of a cow using a combination of wood chips, alfalfa and straw. On Tuesday, May 21, 2019, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed a bill into law that allows licensed facilities to offer "natural organic reduction," which turns a body, mixed with substances such as wood chips and straw, into soil in a span of several weeks. Th law makes Washington the first state in the U.S. to approve composting as an alternative to burying or cremating human remains. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)


SEATTLE (AP) — Ashes to ashes, guts to dirt.
Gov. Jay Inslee signed legislation Tuesday making Washington the first state to approve composting as an alternative to burying or cremating human remains.
It allows licensed facilities to offer “natural organic reduction,” which turns a body, mixed with substances such as wood chips and straw, into about two wheelbarrows’ worth of soil in a span of several weeks.
Loved ones are allowed to keep the soil to spread, just as they might spread the ashes of someone who has been cremated — or even use it to plant vegetables or a tree.
“It gives meaning and use to what happens to our bodies after death,” said Nora Menkin, executive director of the Seattle-based People’s Memorial Association, which helps people plan for funerals.
Supporters say the method is an environmentally friendly alternative to cremation, which releases carbon dioxide and particulates into the air, and conventional burial, in which people are drained of their blood, pumped full of formaldehyde and other chemicals that can pollute groundwater, and placed in a nearly indestructible coffin, taking up land.
“That’s a serious weight on the earth and the environment as your final farewell,” said Sen. Jamie Pedersen, the Seattle Democrat who sponsored the measure.
He said the legislation was inspired by his neighbor: Katrina Spade, who was an architecture graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, when she began researching the funeral industry. She came up with the idea for human composting, modeling it on a practice farmers have long used to dispose of livestock.
She tweaked the process and found that wood chips, alfalfa and straw created a mixture of nitrogen and carbon that accelerates natural decomposition when a body is placed in a temperature- and moisture-controlled vessel and rotated.
A pilot project at Washington State University tested the idea last year on six bodies, all donors who Spade said wanted to be part of the study.
In 2017, Spade founded Recompose, a company working to bring the concept to the public. It’s working on raising nearly $7 million to establish a facility in Seattle and begin to expand elsewhere, she said.
State law previously dictated that remains be disposed of by burial or cremation. The law, which takes effect in May 2020, added composting as well as alkaline hydrolysis, a process already legal in 19 other states. The latter uses heat, pressure, water and chemicals like lye to reduce remains.
Cemeteries across the country are allowed to offer natural or “green” burials, by which people are buried in biodegradable shrouds or caskets without being embalmed. Composting could be a good option in cities where cemetery land is scarce, Pedersen said. Spade described it as “the urban equivalent to natural burial.”
The state senator said he has received angry emails from people who object to the idea, calling it undignified or disgusting.
“The image they have is that you’re going to toss Uncle Henry out in the backyard and cover him with food scraps,” Pedersen said.
To the contrary, he said, the process will be respectful.
Recompose’s website envisions an atrium-like space where bodies are composted in compartments stacked in a honeycomb design. Families will be able to visit, providing an emotional connection typically missing at crematoriums, the company says.
“It’s an interesting concept,” said Edward Bixby, president of the Placerville, California-based Green Burial Council. “I’m curious to see how well it’s received.”
 
When I saw the title of the thread, some how I was expecting something concerning 'democrats'.

Gives a whole new meaning to "Love thy neighbor" or "Eat Organic".
 
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There is a problem with burial space but not sure this is the answer.
 
https://www.apnews.com/65306ba86c24482baed58e7c0c2e39d7


Washington is 1st state to allow composting of human bodies
By GENE JOHNSONyesterday


Katrina Spade
1 of 3
FILE - In this April 19, 2019, file photo, Katrina Spade, the founder and CEO of Recompose, a company that hopes to use composting as an alternative to burying or cremating human remains, poses for a photo in a cemetery in Seattle, as she displays a sample of compost material left from the decomposition of a cow using a combination of wood chips, alfalfa and straw. On Tuesday, May 21, 2019, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed a bill into law that allows licensed facilities to offer "natural organic reduction," which turns a body, mixed with substances such as wood chips and straw, into soil in a span of several weeks. Th law makes Washington the first state in the U.S. to approve composting as an alternative to burying or cremating human remains. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)


SEATTLE (AP) — Ashes to ashes, guts to dirt.
Gov. Jay Inslee signed legislation Tuesday making Washington the first state to approve composting as an alternative to burying or cremating human remains.
It allows licensed facilities to offer “natural organic reduction,” which turns a body, mixed with substances such as wood chips and straw, into about two wheelbarrows’ worth of soil in a span of several weeks.
Loved ones are allowed to keep the soil to spread, just as they might spread the ashes of someone who has been cremated — or even use it to plant vegetables or a tree.
“It gives meaning and use to what happens to our bodies after death,” said Nora Menkin, executive director of the Seattle-based People’s Memorial Association, which helps people plan for funerals.
Supporters say the method is an environmentally friendly alternative to cremation, which releases carbon dioxide and particulates into the air, and conventional burial, in which people are drained of their blood, pumped full of formaldehyde and other chemicals that can pollute groundwater, and placed in a nearly indestructible coffin, taking up land.
“That’s a serious weight on the earth and the environment as your final farewell,” said Sen. Jamie Pedersen, the Seattle Democrat who sponsored the measure.
He said the legislation was inspired by his neighbor: Katrina Spade, who was an architecture graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, when she began researching the funeral industry. She came up with the idea for human composting, modeling it on a practice farmers have long used to dispose of livestock.
She tweaked the process and found that wood chips, alfalfa and straw created a mixture of nitrogen and carbon that accelerates natural decomposition when a body is placed in a temperature- and moisture-controlled vessel and rotated.
A pilot project at Washington State University tested the idea last year on six bodies, all donors who Spade said wanted to be part of the study.
In 2017, Spade founded Recompose, a company working to bring the concept to the public. It’s working on raising nearly $7 million to establish a facility in Seattle and begin to expand elsewhere, she said.
State law previously dictated that remains be disposed of by burial or cremation. The law, which takes effect in May 2020, added composting as well as alkaline hydrolysis, a process already legal in 19 other states. The latter uses heat, pressure, water and chemicals like lye to reduce remains.
Cemeteries across the country are allowed to offer natural or “green” burials, by which people are buried in biodegradable shrouds or caskets without being embalmed. Composting could be a good option in cities where cemetery land is scarce, Pedersen said. Spade described it as “the urban equivalent to natural burial.”
The state senator said he has received angry emails from people who object to the idea, calling it undignified or disgusting.
“The image they have is that you’re going to toss Uncle Henry out in the backyard and cover him with food scraps,” Pedersen said.
To the contrary, he said, the process will be respectful.
Recompose’s website envisions an atrium-like space where bodies are composted in compartments stacked in a honeycomb design. Families will be able to visit, providing an emotional connection typically missing at crematoriums, the company says.
“It’s an interesting concept,” said Edward Bixby, president of the Placerville, California-based Green Burial Council. “I’m curious to see how well it’s received.”

(The state in which I reside.......) Why am I not surprised ?

Oh, and Jay Inslee is running for President. I cracked up laughing a couple of weeks ago when he claimed the (AOC’s) green, new deal as his idea. Then, last week, drunk/crazy uncle joe made the same claim... :eek::LOL::LOL::LOL:
 
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Why not? If you want to compost your corpse... go for it?

And besides, what is getting buried in a pine box anyway? It's composting. Just does it inside a spendy pine box.

Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms!

Freedom of choice.... if Ted Williams can get his head frozen in an over=priced Birdseye TV Dinner package, why can't someone get turned into Rose mulch?

Cheers,

Sirhr

PS. I am going to sue to get immolated in a 21 foot Bass-masters-pro boat with a viking head glued on the bow... the whole neighborhood will smell like burning plastic, bacon and maple products. There will be much wailing. Valhalla!
 
It doesn't always work as planned. Don't want to start a grease fire.
 
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It’s probably happened inadvertently in the past where a plant was consumed by another person that had grown directly from minerals of a corpse. The Earth was created to recycle itself.

But if these wack jobs start promoting farming food items and not flower beds with their compost. Well..
 
And that is weirder than having all your fluids sucked out, and replaced with some other shit, sowing your eyes and mouth shut, and sealing you in metal box in concrete box. After everyone has a chance to check out the taxidermy job that was done on you?

Ashes do add available trace minerals to compost. You could be cremated and composted. Ash is missing from most every compost pile in America, since we stopped cooking with fires. Of course a compost pile is missing from most every house since we stopped growing our own food.
 
We've been composting bodies on our farm every since I can remember, Italian Guys use to drop them off with their Cadillac's. My Father use to tell us to go play in the bone yard when we were young.
bones.jpg
 
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"From the earth we came from, and to the earth we shall return. The principles behind the concept are understandable. The bodies of all terrestrial and marine animals are roughly 75% water with the rest being lipids, calcium and trace elements. All of that returns into the soil anyway after death, no matter how well embalmed or sealed the body was.

A university in Texas [Correction: Tennessee] which specializes in criminal justice and forensics even got a "body farm" on their campus. Basically a wooded area where the corpses of individuals who have chosen to donate themselves to science after death are left to decompose naturally while students study the process of decomposition and how to obtain forensic clues from the evidence around them. One interesting thing to note is that upon the rupture, or "purge" of a bloated cadaver, where the liquefied contents of the internal organs are released into the ground all around it, this liquid is so rich in nitrogen compounds that initially, the vegetation surrounding the corpse dies en masse. However, within months, this same area will see an unmatched and incredible growth in all kinds of vegetation, plants and fungi. Thus, for forensic investigators, even if a decomposed body that they are trying to trace, has been devoured by animals or removed in any other way, the telltale signs that it had been there would be the lush pocket of plant life among the rest of the surrounding biome.

In 1932, my great-grand uncle was a home guard unit captain in the South Gobi region of Lower (Chinese) Mongolia during the first attempt by the Japanese to invade the area. The lore is passed down in the family that, when the men grabbed their horses and rifles and rode out to counter the invaders, he told them: "Gentlemen, today we are going to make this desert finally fertile with wildflowers and grazing pastures". Well of course, the South Gobi remains barren, dusty, and windblown to this day, but the results of the 6-month long war was evident......The language of Lower Mongolia is still Han Mandarin...

But back to the OP...One of the most interesting things about the terrestrial biosphere is that it is self sustaining and self regulating. No matter if organic material is left to decompose, cremated, or composted, the end result is still the completion of the carbon and nitrogen cycle to re-sustain new life. Even formaldehyde will be broken down by certain kinds of anaerobic bacteria that feeds on organic compounds...


Edit: Mixed up location of the Body Farm.
 
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Ash is missing from most every compost pile in America, since we stopped cooking with fires. Of course a compost pile is missing from most every house since we stopped growing our own food.

Not mine, and its supplemented by a lot of wolfshit.

Ill look into adding ash.
 
"From the earth we came from, and to the earth we shall return. The principles behind the concept are understandable. The bodies of all terrestrial and marine animals are roughly 75% water with the rest being lipids, calcium and trace elements. All of that returns into the soil anyway after death, no matter how well embalmed or sealed the body was.

A university in Texas which specializes in criminal justice and forensics even got a "body farm" on their campus. Basically a wooded area where the corpses of individuals who have chosen to donate themselves to science after death are left to decompose naturally while students study the process of decomposition and how to obtain forensic clues from the evidence around them. One interesting thing to note is that upon the rupture, or "purge" of a bloated cadaver, where the liquefied contents of the internal organs are released into the ground all around it, this liquid is so rich in nitrogen compounds that initially, the vegetation surrounding the corpse dies en masse. However, within months, this same area will see an unmatched and incredible growth in all kinds of vegetation, plants and fungi. Thus, for forensic investigators, even if a decomposed body that they are trying to trace, has been devoured by animals or removed in any other way, the telltale signs that it had been there would be the lush pocket of plant life among the rest of the surrounding biome.

In 1932, my great-grand uncle was a home guard unit captain in the South Gobi region of Lower (Chinese) Mongolia during the first attempt by the Japanese to invade the area. The lore is passed down in the family that, when the men grabbed their horses and rifles and rode out to counter the invaders, he told them: "Gentlemen, today we are going to make this desert finally fertile with wildflowers and grazing pastures". Well of course, the South Gobi remains barren, dusty, and windblown to this day, but the results of the 6-month long war was evident......The language of Lower Mongolia is still Han Mandarin...

But back to the OP...One of the most interesting things about the terrestrial biosphere is that it is self sustaining and self regulating. No matter if organic material is left to decompose, cremated, or composted, the end result is still the completion of the carbon and nitrogen cycle to re-sustain new life. Even formaldehyde will be broken down by certain kinds of anaerobic bacteria that feeds on organic compounds...

I only ask because youve made several references to your family. Are you native Chinese and emigrated, or born here and have family? Regardless, thanks for all the interesting posts and info we'd never hear otherwise.
 
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I only ask because youve made several references to your family. Are you native Chinese and emigrated, or born here and have family? Regardless, thanks for all the interesting posts and info we'd never hear otherwise.


Hey thanks man! :) Me, I am born here in the USA, and grown up in New York City.
 
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'Bout Time people stopped taking up prime real estate for eternity when they pass. Recycle the nutrients and leave the land for a new forest.

I'm gonna do it. I was gonna be cremated but this composting at least puts something back for all the stuff I have consumed over the years. Can't take it with - leave it behind works for me.

VooDoo
 
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"From the earth we came from, and to the earth we shall return. The principles behind the concept are understandable. The bodies of all terrestrial and marine animals are roughly 75% water with the rest being lipids, calcium and trace elements. All of that returns into the soil anyway after death, no matter how well embalmed or sealed the body was.

A university in Texas which specializes in criminal justice and forensics even got a "body farm" on their campus. Basically a wooded area where the corpses of individuals who have chosen to donate themselves to science after death are left to decompose naturally while students study the process of decomposition and how to obtain forensic clues from the evidence around them. One interesting thing to note is that upon the rupture, or "purge" of a bloated cadaver, where the liquefied contents of the internal organs are released into the ground all around it, this liquid is so rich in nitrogen compounds that initially, the vegetation surrounding the corpse dies en masse. However, within months, this same area will see an unmatched and incredible growth in all kinds of vegetation, plants and fungi. Thus, for forensic investigators, even if a decomposed body that they are trying to trace, has been devoured by animals or removed in any other way, the telltale signs that it had been there would be the lush pocket of plant life among the rest of the surrounding biome.

In 1932, my great-grand uncle was a home guard unit captain in the South Gobi region of Lower (Chinese) Mongolia during the first attempt by the Japanese to invade the area. The lore is passed down in the family that, when the men grabbed their horses and rifles and rode out to counter the invaders, he told them: "Gentlemen, today we are going to make this desert finally fertile with wildflowers and grazing pastures". Well of course, the South Gobi remains barren, dusty, and windblown to this day, but the results of the 6-month long war was evident......The language of Lower Mongolia is still Han Mandarin...

But back to the OP...One of the most interesting things about the terrestrial biosphere is that it is self sustaining and self regulating. No matter if organic material is left to decompose, cremated, or composted, the end result is still the completion of the carbon and nitrogen cycle to re-sustain new life. Even formaldehyde will be broken down by certain kinds of anaerobic bacteria that feeds on organic compounds...

The Body Farm is, I think, in Tennessee or Ky. One of the universities runs it as a lab for forensic anthropology and law enforcement. One of the guys from our department did a two or three week forensics course there. He said the smells are medieval!

Cheers,

Sirhr
 
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The Body Farm is, I think, in Tennessee or Ky. One of the universities runs it as a lab for forensic anthropology and law enforcement. One of the guys from our department did a two or three week forensics course there. He said the smells are medieval!

Cheers,

Sirhr


You are correct. The Body Farm is located in Knoxville, Tennessee. And yep, field trips for the students are probably best when conducted during the peak of the hot and sticky summer, when the fauna are most active. :LOL: