Please tell us a little about Recompose—what is it and why are you pursuing it?

Recompose is a benefit corporation that I founded last year which aims to reexamine and redesign the death care experience. We are doing this in two ways. First, we have created a new, nature-based alternative to cremation and burial. Our process  – called recomposition – accelerates natural decomposition, and turns human bodies into soil. This soil can then be used by friends and family to grow new life. Second, we are redesigning the death care experience to make it more meaningful for the friends and families of loved ones who have died.

What is the relationship between traditional burial practices in the funeral industry and death denial?

The funeral industry is complicit in death denial. In most of Western society, when someone dies, professionals take care of the body, even though taking care of a dead body is something that anyone can do. The practice of embalming (which is practiced mostly in the U.S. and Canada,) is a direct physical embodiment of death denial. Instead of allowing a dead body to look dead and deteriorate, we replace bodily fluids with chemical solutions that stave off decomposition and give the corpse’s skin a life-like glow. It is culturally normative in the United States to make our dead bodies look alive, and I’d say that this is symptomatic of our society’s disengagement from the event of death.

We’ve calculated that recomposing a single body can save a metric ton of carbon from being released into the atmosphere.

Also, an embalmed body is typically buried in a casket that is placed inside an eight-inch thick concrete grave liner to protect against decomposition. This gravesite generally sits within a heavily manicured cemetery, and the individual will own and occupy that land for eternity. We try to both distance the corpse from nature as much as possible and leave an enduring physical mark on the natural world. These cultural practices support Becker’s notion that death anxiety prompts us to distance ourselves from and dominate nature.

Recomposition, on the other hand, looks at decomposition and the natural cycles honestly. In fact, the process celebrates them. So it is quite antithetical to death denial – it is hard to deny that someone has died if her or his body is decomposing.

What is the environmental impact of traditional burial practices?

Both embalming and cremation adversely affect the environment. Conventional burials utilize a variety of obstructive, invasive, and toxic products, such as embalming fluid, which pollutes groundwater, headstones, lacquered caskets, and concrete grave liners. The climate change impact of conventional burials is largely derived from the transportation of bodies and the manufacturing of caskets, concrete, and headstones. Of course, cemeteries also take up an enormous amount of valuable land. Cremation, which is now more popular that conventional burial practices, emits roughly 600 million pounds of carbon into the atmosphere annually.

Recomposition is designed as a response to these problems and – as importantly – as a way to offer a more meaningful death care experience.

The concept was inspired by natural burial, where the body is wrapped in a shroud and placed directly in the ground on conservation land or in a rural setting. Because it’s buried just three or four feet from the surface, microbes and plant life can interact with it, which helps the body decompose. I love natural burial, but we don’t have enough land to make it a feasible alternative everywhere.

In a way, Recomposition is bringing the best of natural burial to the urban environment. We’ve calculated that recomposing a single body can save a metric ton of carbon from being released into the atmosphere. And, of course, the process also supports soil health. Recomposition lets us return to the Earth naturally, and to connect our death to the cycles of nature.

For more information about Recompose, see Click Here