Don't bury or cremate – soon you may compost your corpse
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Re: Don't bury or cremate – soon you may compost your corpse
#2While composting has a lot of benefits, I would be very sad to attend a friend's burial if they were to be composted. Feels like a disrespectful way to let someone go.
I'm also concerned about disease transmission. Cows' diseases may not necessarily affect us but humans' certainly will. The need to disinfect kinda defeats the purpose (pollution with chemicals)
Hope about we just compost other things and let human bodies be
Re: Don't bury or cremate – soon you may compost your corpse
#3This has been done over centuries, and is still standard in Europe, where the embalming fad never has caught on.
Re: Don't bury or cremate – soon you may compost your corpse
#4There was a great article on nrk.no about how people are still not decomposed in their graves after 70 years: https://www.nrk.no/viten/xl/plassmangel-og-blaleire-gir-stor...
One example is clay. Burying in clay rich ground will slow decay because it limits the flow of air.
Another example is from the late 1950s where people would be buried in plastic wrap, to make the burial process more sanitary. They did this for 15-20 years. None of those bodies have decomposed much, but worse is that all the liquids are trapped inside the plastic :|
Re: Don't bury or cremate – soon you may compost your corpse
#5I thought we are all worm food
Re: Don't bury or cremate – soon you may compost your corpse
#6I would love to know how this process compares to simple burial in a wicker basket or something like that. I always assumed that decomposition in soil, without any embalming chemicals or hardwood coffin, would be about as natural as decomposition would get.
I guess the compost from this process would be of higher quality, but compared to burying your loved one in a machine where they have to decompose for a few weeks, I think returning them straight to the earth would feel better for the relatives.
Re: Don't bury or cremate – soon you may compost your corpse
#7This has been done over centuries, and is still standard in Europe, where the embalming fad never has caught on.
> is still standard in Europe
AFAIK that's not really true, europeans are not usually highly embalmed but they're mostly buried in coffins in vaults rented for years or decades (depending on the country).
AFAIK https://i2.wp.com/www.talkdeath.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/... is a pretty typical-looking cemetery for western europe at least (some countries tend towards just the headstone and no vault, but as an other commenter notes that doesn't mean the body readily decomposes either)
Re: Don't bury or cremate – soon you may compost your corpse
#8While composting has a lot of benefits, I would be very sad to attend a friend's burial if they were to be composted. Feels like a disrespectful way to let someone go. I'm also concerned about disease transmission. Cows' diseases may not necessarily affect us but humans' certainly will. The need to disinfect kinda defeats the purpose (pollution with chemicals) Hope about we just compost other things and let human bod…
I don't think it's particularly disrespectful, isn't all that's needed a change of perspective? What makes it disrespectful, precisely?
The common method of embalming in North America seems more disrespectful - pumping a body full of chemicals that weren't there in the first place and helping to pollute the earth.
Re: Don't bury or cremate – soon you may compost your corpse
#9This has been done over centuries, and is still standard in Europe, where the embalming fad never has caught on.
I wanted to say that there's plenty of embalming in Europe, but I figured I'd check to verify first. Turns out that in Netherland until 2009 it used to be illegal to embalm the dead, with an exception for members of the royal family.
Re: Don't bury or cremate – soon you may compost your corpse
#10I would love to know how this process compares to simple burial in a wicker basket or something like that. I always assumed that decomposition in soil, without any embalming chemicals or hardwood coffin, would be about as natural as decomposition would get. I guess the compost from this process would be of higher quality, but compared to burying your loved one in a machine where they have to decompose for a few weeks…
Decomposition would be best in the open, not buried in the soil. You need oxygen for all kind of life to eat your corpse.
Sky Burial would be my favorite way to go.