Human Composting Now Legal in California

 This weekend, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law that makes human composting legal in the state beginning in 2027. The bill, AB-351, makes California the fifth state to allow human composting since it was first legalized in Washington in 2019 (Oregon, Colorado, and Vermont are the other places where you can make yourself into mulch)....Burying a dead body takes about three gallons of embalming liquid per corpse—stuff like formaldehyde, methanol, and ethanol—and about 5.3 million gallons total gets buried with bodies each year. Meanwhile, cremation creates more than 500 pounds (227 kilograms) of carbon dioxide from the burning process of just one body, and the burning itself uses up the energy equivalent of two tanks of gasoline. In the U.S., cremation creates roughly 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.

It’s a no-brainer, then, to think of greener alternatives. The most common process for human composting—and the one laid out in the new California law—is called natural organic reduction, which involves leaving the body in a container with some wood chips and other organic matter for about a month to let bacteria do its work. The resulting mulch (yep, it’s human body mulch) is then allowed to cure for a few more weeks before being turned over to the family. Each body can produce about a cubic yard of soil, or around one pickup truckbeds’ worth. According to Garcia’s release, this process will save about a metric ton of CO2 per body. 

Human Composting Now Legal in California

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Modern Loss Handbook

Modern Loss is all about eradicating the stigma and awkwardness around grief while also focusing on our capacity for resilience and finding meaning. In this interactive guide, In the Modern Loss Handbook, cofounder Rebecca Soffer offers candid, practical, and witty advice for confronting a future without your person, honoring their memory, dealing with trigger days, managing your professional life, and navigating new and existing relationships. You’ll find no worn-out platitudes or empty assurances here. With prompts, creative projects, innovative rituals, therapeutic-based exercises, and more, this is the place to explore the messy, long arc of loss on your own timeline—and without judgment.
 

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Dust to Dust: Americans Increasingly Choosing Cremation

Cremation is now America’s leading form of final “disposition,” as the funeral industry calls it — a preference that shows no sign of abating.
In 2020, 56 percent of Americans who died were cremated, more than double the figure of 27 percent two decades earlier, according to the Cremation Association of North America (CANA). By 2040, 4 out of 5 Americans are projected to chose cremation over casket burial, according to both CANA and the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA).
This seismic shift represents potentially severe revenue losses for the funeral industry. It’s leading innovators to create a growing number of green alternatives and other choices that depart from traditional casket funerals. And rapidly shifting views about disposing with bodies have also led to changes in how we memorialize loved ones  — and reflect an increasingly secular, transient and, some argue, death-phobic nation.

Washington Post