Recompose: Would You Like To Be A Tree After Death?

In 2017, designer Katrina Spade founded Recompose, an ecological alternative to today’s funeral practices. With this practice, she aims to be a part of the ecosystem again without harming nature. Before talking about this practice, which has the potential to be the choice of many people in the future, let’s talk about common practices of today.

Although we sometimes forget its existence in daily rush, death is a part of life. Unfortunately, people do not think about the variety of such ceremonies, their costs and consequences, until they lose one of their loved ones. As a part of humankind that affects the world in almost every sense, we must take into consider every action we take. Even after death.

The soil is getting contaminated day by day. Factory wastes and harmful gases devolve on the soil through rain. This unfortunately affects the bacteria, fungi and insects that are responsible for decomposing us in the soil. The amount of such creatures is decreasing, affecting decompose and our recycling to the ecosystem.

Another problem is the chemicals that have accumulated in our body.  Pesticides and preservatives that prolong the shelf life of foods are the main examples of such chemicals. Our bodies are unable to dissolve these chemicals and begin to accumulate them in the liver and adipose tissues. When we die, these chemicals give rise to an embalming effect that prevents body decompose.

Conventional Funeral

Today, common funeral practices in the US include conventional funeral and cremation. In the conventional funeral ceremony, funeral staff drain the body fluid. They replace it with a mixture designed to protect the body and give it a realistic glow. The bodies are then buried in a coffin, in a concrete-lined grave in a cemetery. The mixture in the mummified body contains chemicals such as formaldehyde, phenol, methanol and glycerine. This means that more than 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde are put into the soil each year in the US. Moreover, the amount of coffin wood alone equates to about 4 million acres of forest. With this amount of wood, we can build about 4.5 million homes. The average funeral, including all related expenses, costs around $10,000. In fact, that cemeteries take up so much space may be a problem for many countries in the future.

Cremation

Because of the reasons above, people are starting to turn to cremation in recent years. It is more affordable, and ecological compared to a conventional funeral. So, it attracts many people. Still, this practice has a huge and significant defect. Like all other living things, we have a role in the life cycle after death – we must decompose in the soil. Cremation completely obstructs this task. Also, standard cremations require natural gas burning, thus triggering greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, many harmful chemicals can be found in the body. These include mercury, dioxins and furans used in amalgam dental fillings. These chemicals as well as chemicals that enter the body with foods, mentioned at the beginning of the article, vaporize.  As a result, besides toxic substances like mercury, cremations in the US release 600 million pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

Recompose

After all, you may be thinking about what we should do then?

Farmers in agricultural institutions have practiced something called animal mortality compost for years. In this process, a high-nitrogen animal is coated with high-carbon composting materials. In the most primitive way, it is covered with high-carbon wood chips and left outside to provide moisture from rain and air to provide oxygen. Within 9 months, what remains is a nutrient-rich organic fertilizer. The meat has completely turned into organic fertilizer.

This idea inspired Katrina Spade and she developed a project called Recompose to implement this process for humans. She established a human recompose facility in Seattle. When someone dies,  their body is wrapped in a veil. Then family and friends move the body onto the core containing the natural decomposition system. Lastly, they cover the body with pieces of wood. Thus, the decomposition process begins. After about 30 days of processing, the body turns into soil.  Ultimately, we can grow a tree in the soil we transform into and become part of ecology.

It is an important detail how the process Recompose affects the chemicals that accumulate in our body. Toxic substances such as mercury, as mentioned earlier, do not evaporate into the atmosphere in this process as in cremation, since the temperature is kept at minimum limits. Spade also states that it may be possible to convert the heat generated during this process into energy.

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