It’s more expensive than cremation but less than a full funeral. The cost for human composting is about $7,000, which includes pickup and composting. That’s plenty of a composted Uncle Leo to spread around his favorite tomato plants. The result is about a cubic yard of what is described as “soil amendment.” Human composting produces about three times as much material as a bag of potting soil, which you can buy from any nursery. When all is said and done, the entire process takes about 120 days as the material needs to be “cured” for another two to six weeks. According to Recompose founder Katrina Spade, “The body is placed in a reusable vessel along with plant materials such as wood chips, alfalfa, and straw.” The vessel is then stored at a unique facility to allow the microbes and bacteria to break down the body over a month or so. Recompose, a green funeral home that operates out of Seattle, Washington, offers human composting as an option, along with traditional funeral services and cremation. The process of human composting is quite involved. To set the record straight, you can’t just dump Uncle Leo into your composting bin with apple cores, egg shells, and lawn trimmings. The process actually has a name, “terramation,” but is also referred to as “Natural Organic Reduction.” Washington State became the first to allow human composting in 2019, followed by Vermont, Oregon, Colorado, and California. Recently, New York became the sixth state nationally to legalize human composting after death. Most of us, with meager 75 x 100 properties, want to keep our neighbors happy. Of course, composting piles are often accompanied by a specific offending odor. The process takes a few months, but eventually, composters are rewarded with nutrient-rich soil for use in their gardens. Long Islanders with large properties sometimes create compost piles to store food scraps and lawn trimmings, allowing Mother Nature to break them down naturally. Ignore the garbage, and it will eventually begin to stink. Even garbage bags, from time to time, break, causing a mess inside the pail. I don’t believe there is a law against tossing garbage directly into the outside garbage pails without a bag, but no one does that. We spend hundreds of dollars every year on garbage bags to camouflage the odor from rotting food. Old, rotting food stinks after a few days, especially during hot weather. Most of the time, it’s because somebody threw a food item into the pail a few days ago and now it is rotting away. Sometimes, the garbage in my kitchen pail really stinks.
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