Posted January 6, 2023, 7:10 am
This is a procedure that is gaining ground across the Atlantic. New York has become the sixth American state legalize “natural organic reduction”, better known as human composting or humusation, as an alternative to cemeteries or crematoria.
Washington state was the first to legalize human composting in 2019, followed by Colorado and Oregon in 2021, then Vermont and California in 2022. Fox News explains that this option, more ecological than the others, allows you to stay in line with its environmental values.
36 bags of earth
Human composting involves placing the body of the deceased in a reusable container, along with plant materials such as wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. This organic blend creates “the perfect habitat” for microbes to do their job and decompose the body quickly and efficiently in about a month, American media reports. A heating process is also employed to kill off any contagions.
What emerges is a cubic meter pile of nutrient-rich material, the equivalent of approx 36 bags of fertilizer soil, which can be used to plant trees, flowers or vegetables. In urban areas like New York City, where land is limited, this alternative can be “quite attractive,” Fox News said.
However, this practice is not unanimous, the media underline, quoting the executive director of the Catholic Conference of the state of New York: “A process that is perfectly suitable for returning vegetable waste to the earth is not necessarily suitable for human bodies”, complains Dennis Poust. “Human bodies are not domestic waste and we do not believe that this process responds to a dignified treatment of our earthly remains. »
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