Delaware is one of just 12 states to legalize human composting as more Americans look for environmentally friendly alternatives to conventional burial and cremation.
It’s a process that involves warm air being emitted inside large vessels that hold human remains together with organic materials for roughly a month; the body decomposes into soil, which is then given back to the families of the deceased.
Earth Funeral, an organic reduction provider in Washington State, helped guide Delaware’s plans for human composting, and its CEO and co-founder Tom Harries says people can do a number of things with the soil.
“We’ve had people planting memorial gardens. We’ve had people planting bushes, potted plants,” Harries said. “We’ve had people who went on multi-state road trips that they did with a lost loved one and scattered the soil in every place that they stopped on that road trip. We’ve had people who keep the soil.”
Harries adds that human composting can be an uncomfortable topic because people naturally don’t like discussing their own mortality.
“If you think a little bit about the process of being embalmed and buried, it’s not particularly pleasant. If you think about the process of being cremated at 1,500 degrees, it’s arguably not very pleasant,” Harries said. “We find that [human] composting falls in that category, too, where it’s more a question of considering your own mortality than anything specifically wrong with our process.”
On average, it costs about $5,000 to go the human composting route.
