There are several reasons to choose being composted over alternative end-of-life methods. Burial uses a hefty amount of nasty stuff that’s harmful to the environment. One corpse needs about three gallons of chemicals, including formaldehyde, methanol, and ethanol, which can leach into soil and groundwater; around 5.3 million gallons get buried with dead bodies each year. Meanwhile, cremating bodies takes energy and in the U.S. generates about 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year from the burning process.

Natural organic reduction works by curing a human corpse with wood chips in a special container for several weeks, where it breaks down into mulch. Each body produces a cubic yard of soil—about what can fit in a pickup truck—that the family of the deceased can then use in gardens or scatter outdoors. Industry estimates show that the process could save around one metric ton of CO2 per body. The movement around human composting in the U.S. has picked up steam in recent years. In 2019, Washington became the first state to legalize the process; it was quickly followed by Colorado and Oregon in 2021. New York is the third state, following California and Vermont, to legalize human composting in 2022; Delaware, Hawaii, and Maine have all proposed similar legislation. Bills in New York to legalize the process were proposed in 2020 and 2021 but never got traction to come to a vote; this past year, however, the bill sailed nearly unanimously through the House and Senate. Human composting in the U.S. has been almost entirely spearheaded by a Seattle-based organization called Recompose, which was the first organization to license human composting in the U.S. and whose founder, Katrina Spade, patented the natural organic reduction process.

You can read more in an article by Molly Taft published in the Gizmodo.com web site at: https://gizmodo.com/new-york-legalizes-human-composting-1849945144.