[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find now, temperate zones and tropic climbs and run through currents and thriving seas, winds blowing through freezing trees and strongholds on safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Hello, ksquid listeners. It's every other Sunday again, and you're listening to sustainability now, a bi weekly radio show on KSQD focused on environment, sustainability, and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California, and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. What happens to your corporeal body if and when it is buried in the Earth? According to Genesis in the Old Testament, we come from dust, and to dust we return. The original hebrew text, however, uses the word apar, which means Earth. Most burials in the United States seek to protect the body from returning to Earth through containment. Cremation, which is growing in popularity, produces greenhouse gases and leaves behind heavy metals in the ashes. Are there other ways to go?
My guest today is Katrina Spade, chief executive officer of Recompose, a Seattle based public benefit green funeral home that composts human bodies, turning them into soil that can be spread almost anywhere. While earning her masters of architecture, Katrina invented a system to transform the dead into soil. In 2014, she created the Urban Death project to bring attention to the problem of a toxic disempowering funeral industry, and in 2017, founded Recompose. Katrina Spade, welcome to sustainability now.
[00:02:01] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: I want to ask some questions about your background in personal history, but why don't we start with having you tell us about natural burial and the process that recomposes uses to compost bodies, how it works, and how does it compare to cremation and other types of green burials?
[00:02:21] Speaker C: Well, thank you so much for that question. I'll start by mentioning that actually, what recompose my company does is different than natural burial. So natural burial is something that exists all over the world, and it has for millennia, and it's practiced in the US, but not as frequently as the burial we think of today with embalming and casket and all that. But, you know, what I've developed is something called human composting, which is in a lot of ways related to natural burial because it is about returning to the earth. It is about letting our bodies go back to the ecosystem. But in fact, it is a human managed process of natural decomposition, where we're transforming bodies into soil rather than placing them in the ground.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: Okay, and how does it, you know, just give us a summary of how it works.
[00:03:16] Speaker C: Sure. So composting, most of you know, probably it's a matter of combining the right materials together to encourage microbial activity. And in our case, we're taking a mixture of wood chips, alfalfa and straw, placing that mixture in a vessel, stainless steel vessel, we place a person's body on top of that material and cover it with more of the same. And over the next month and a half or so, the body decomposes and we're creating compost that we can give back to family.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: And how long does that process take.
[00:03:52] Speaker C: Altogether, including the curing process, it's between two and three months.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: That's almost as quick as doing composting out in windrows.
Was there something in your background that piqued your interest in what you're doing now?
[00:04:10] Speaker C: Let's see. Yes, I was in graduate school for architecture, so I was in the world of design and thinking about systems that humans create and thinking about what, frankly, what to do my thesis project on. And then I was also, importantly, I turned 30 years old. And so I was feeling my mortality very deeply at the time. I know you roll your eyes right, it's only because.
[00:04:37] Speaker B: Only because, you know, when you get to be my age, you think about it even more, but.
[00:04:42] Speaker C: Exactly right. 30 years old, but.
So I started to look into the funeral industry. I found it to be, and still do, a fascinating topic. You can do a real deep dive on how it was created in the US and how far at a far distance most of us keep death, in part because the way the funeral industry was designed and has been operated. And so I started to think there's got to be a different way. I mean, it was very personal at the time. It was like, I don't really want to be cremated. And I definitely know I don't want to be buried in the conventional manner with embalming and a headstone and a mown cemetery. So how odd that there aren't a bunch of different options for a bunch of different types of people in the world.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Well, it's probably safe to say that the burial, embalming and burial option has something to do with the christian notion of the afterlife, of resurrection.
[00:05:40] Speaker C: I think you may be right. But honestly, I think that historically it was. Well, I know embalming was created the modern version in during the civil war as a way to get soldiers back to their. From the south to the north after they died. And it was also pre sold to live soldiers. Like, hey, in case you die, repay for your embalming will get you home. And you might argue like, that's nothing a bad reason for embalming to exist. But then Lincoln was taken on a 16 city tour, embalmed after he died and was embalmed. And that was like the most wonderful marketing, you know, exposition ever. 16 cities by train. Look at how perfectly preserved that ex president is. And then embalming took off from there. So I believe it was a little more of a business opportunity than a religious thing.
[00:06:35] Speaker B: Well, I mean, that figures. I know that in Judaism, one is not supposed to decorate one's body with anything, right? Because one is supposed to go back the way one came into the world.
But I'm not quite sure about the long term preservation issue, theologically speaking.
I mean, was there anything in particular that motivated your. Well, I call it here an obsession with the funeral industry and its practices. I mean, did you read Jessica Mitford's american way of death? Or were you a fan of 6ft under?
[00:07:12] Speaker C: I like 6ft under. That's an excellent show, by any account. I think, you know, I kept being struck by the fact that if I was buried in the conventional manner, I would be essentially, you know, essentially pumped full of a toxic chemical and then buried in the ground. And the goal was preservation, which preservation seemed quite. The idea of that seems quite perverse to me, actually. Like, actually, I would rather decompose. I'm a pretty big compost nerd, as you might imagine. And I think there's something really beautiful about that process of decomposition, where, I mean, that's how new life is created, through the death of organic material, through decomposition of that dead organic material, and then on to create soil and new life. So I was struck by the idea of, like, trying to keep that at bay was such a very odd concept. And then with cremation, which people think of as more environmentally friendly, which actually is a myth, it's not more environmentally friendly than conventional burial, but with cremation, it was more, for me personally, was more like, it just feels a little wasteful. Like I'll have something left to give back at the end of my life, maybe even if it's not much right with my physical body, by the time that I die, it felt wasteful to burn that up. And so when I was really. I designed recompose and human composting to be a solution to what I saw as the problems, the problem of those other options.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: Well, you got, as you mentioned, you have an architecture degree from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and maybe you can also go into some more detail about what architecture has or had to do with end of life practices.
[00:09:02] Speaker C: I did love being in graduate school for architecture, realizing that it was more than just about buildings. It's really about systems that humans have created, whether that's urban landscapes or.
Or buildings or collections of buildings and cities. All of that kind of really comes into architecture. And the other thing about University of Massachusetts Amherst was my professors encouraged us to go wild with our thesis projects. We were not expected to imagine a budget, imagine that the buildings would even stand up, necessarily. It was really about stretching the design opportunities, if you will. And so when I started looking at the funeral industry, I thought, well, this is what I want to focus on again, what a fascinating design challenge this is. And so then quickly thought, okay, well, what is my. What is the challenge I'm approaching? Actually, it's.
It's that there is no. That I can see no ecologically driven funeral care option for us in cities. And the city's part is important because we started talking about natural burial. Natural burial is a beautiful, I think, solution. It's a beautiful way of caring for a body after someone's died. But it does take land. So you still put a body in the land, piece of, you know, in the plot, basically, or in the piece of land. And so I thought, well, how can you take that concept of returning to the earth and apply it to the urban centers where billions of us live? And I happen to be also pretty enamored by cities. I just really love living in cities. And so again, it was like, well, I don't want to be brought out to the country after I die to be buried in some beautiful natural burial place. So how do we bring death care naturally into the city?
And I found out pretty quickly about a process that farmers had been using for decades to compost livestock. So whole cows, whole horses, a way to recycle those animals back to the land. And I was like, ah, of course, if you can compost a cow or a horse, you can certainly compost a human being. So that was my inspiration, if you will, where I realized there was already a technical solution, and so then could approach the problem using that technical solution, applying it to the human experience, and then really deepening the opportunity for ritual and meaning that are different than agricultural processes that actually are ways to look at death and death care when someone we love has died. So that became a lot of the design process, was thinking through the human experience.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: It becomes surprising that it hadn't been done before.
I mean, when you put it. When you put it that way, told.
[00:12:01] Speaker C: Me that they had the idea.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I think here in Santa Cruz, there's somebody who I was looking into this a while ago, and I thought I found somebody who was advertising some sort of composting process around here, but I never did follow it up. So, you know, it may be others have. Have tried it, just, you know, there's no record of it. Right. How was. How was your proposal received by your advisors and colleagues? You know, once. Once you think about it, it seems natural, but there are, of course, other aspects to it. So, I mean, what's the reception? What was the reception?
[00:12:45] Speaker C: You know, there's usually a moment where people are first, like, wait, what? What are you talking about?
[00:12:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:51] Speaker C: And then that is usually followed by something like you've sort of described, which is sort of actually, that that makes good sense. You know, even if people don't want that particular option for themselves, it does seem like there's a recognition of, like, if nothing else, like the practicality and logic of it. And then for lots of people, I found there goes beyond practicality and logic, too. Like, oh, that actually, that really resonates, that really. We have clients who we work with who have had a loved one go through this process, and they just are sort of surprised, frankly, at how meaningful it had.
[00:13:30] Speaker B: It was broadly speaking. I mean, you've done, you know, you've done other talks, and what's the broader public reception like?
[00:13:41] Speaker C: I will say I've been surprised at how positive it has been overall.
And when I presented this idea to my thesis professors, there was some laughter. Like, we all. We would sit down together once a week and go through the evolution of the project. And, like, there was definitely always some laughter because it's.
I don't know, death can be funny.
And it seemed like a little bit of an audacious idea at the time. And it wasn't meant to be something real at the beginning anyway. So it was really a design exercise from at the start.
And then as I started to talk to more and more people, I would get more and more of what you just did, which is, you know, it makes good sense, or, you know, I think I'd really like that for myself.
So I actually had a lot at the beginning. A lot of people would say, well, I love this idea, but I don't think my friends would be able to handle it. But, like, everyone was saying that. So we just really early started to realize there's a real interest in improving, and, if you will, innovating on our options right now for when we die, there was a real hunger for something that felt more meaningful and more certainly more aligned with the ecosystems and beneficial, not harmful to the planet. That's kind of. I think that is the underlying reason for many, but it goes a bit beyond that, too.
[00:15:07] Speaker B: So the title of your thesis was a place for the urban dead. And my observation is that there are still many places for the urban dead. I mean, cemeteries, although they're increasingly around the peripheries of cities, there are a lot of them that are in city centers. I mean, I think of New York. Right. And of that vast cemetery in Queens. And you have a structure now, right? I mean, you have a site for your operations. So that's a building.
[00:15:35] Speaker C: Yes, building in Seattle.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: How do you think about that as being then different from other places for the dead?
[00:15:43] Speaker C: Oh, that's such a great question. Right. So while we're definitely. We're emphatically not a cemetery, because what we're doing inside of our facility in Seattle is transforming the dead into soil. And that soil, then, is either either families take all of it home and grow gardens and plant trees with it, or they. They donate it to our conservation land program, where it goes to do various projects, conservation and restoration projects with nonprofit organizations that we've partnered with.
In most cases, that that soil, I hesitate to use this phrase because people have different feelings about it, but in most cases, that soil goes on to be productive, like it actually is used to grow new life. I personally like the idea of being productive after I've died. Some people think, well, first of all, when do I get to rest?
But, like, regardless, it's so different than a cemetery, which is, you could say, is pretty inert, you know, pretty stable and static, whereas when you are transformed into soil, no matter what is done with you, then if you go to this rose garden or that conservation land, you're not staying there for very long. That soil moves on through fauna, eating the tree that was grown from your soil and then the berries are eaten by the birds, and then off you go with a bird. I mean, there's a lot of ways we know that molecules and nature moves around. And so there's something very active and ongoing about what we've created after people die.
[00:17:20] Speaker B: It's a bit karmic, I guess.
You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz, and my guest today is Katrina Spade, the founder and CEO of Recompose, a Seattle based green funeral home that composts human bodies. And we've just been talking about, I guess it would be something like the more natural life cycle. Right? I introduced the show citing Genesis and dust to dust, and pointed out that in the original Hebrew, the term is apar, which actually means earth. So it's actually earth to earth and not dust to dust. So it's not something you sweep up in a dustpan kind of stuff.
There is this idea that you do return to life, albeit not human life, I suppose. What do people tell you when they're, you know, thinking about this and trying to sort of philosophize about it?
[00:18:20] Speaker C: Well, we have a program, a membership program where you can prepay for your future composting with us. That's called, of course, pre compose.
And we have about, let's see, 1800 members currently on the pre compose program from all over the country. And I've heard, you know, it really varies. I've heard some people say, I signed up for pre compose because I wanted to take a tangible action for climate change today. Like, I. This feels right. I know this is the right thing for me. I know I'll save, I'll be sequestering carbon when I die. I won't be adding to the, to the emissions of the funeral industry. And this feels right for that reason. So it's almost like an action. And then we have folks who are like, I've heard a few say I had a real fear of death. I mean, who can blame you, right? That's very, very natural, in my opinion. I had a real fear of death, or I do have a fear of death. And signing up for my future composting, for some reason has quelled that fear a little bit. And I'm not sure what that's about. I wonder if it has something to do with that karmic thing you mentioned, where like, there's something comforting and I will live on in another form.
And if, like me, you're not a religious person, you might not have that otherwise. I don't have that otherwise, like, oh, I'll go to heaven next. It's actually don't really know. But if I'm going to be composted, at least I know that my molecules will go on to be part of nature.
And then we do have people who say, I'm going to sign up for pre compose because, like, it's just logical. It'll get my, my family will know what to do. It ticks the boxes. I'm taking care of business.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: After you did your master's degree, you started something called the Urban Death Project. And I'm curious what that entailed and what you were trying to accomplish with it.
[00:20:19] Speaker C: Well, the Urban Death Project was a very directly named nonprofit organization that was looking at this thesis project I'd created, this building in which composting of humans happened, and figuring out, number one, is there enough interest in this to pursue it? Number two, what needs to happen from a legal standpoint and from a engineering and research standpoint, like I mentioned, like farmers have been composting animals for some time, but that's a fairly different process than when we compost humans for various reasons. And so to do the engineering that needed to happen first, it was like, well, what even needs to happen to make this possible? So there was a lot of proof of concept time. We worked with a university, the western Carolina University. They have a, what's called a body farm there, or also known as a. Let's see.
It's basically a research station where they study human decomposition, and it's within the anthropology department, actually, body farm is such a weird term. I'm not sure when it came about, but it is essentially a place where researchers study the decomposition of human remains.
[00:21:40] Speaker B: As opposed to the sort of forensic approach which looks at skeleton.
[00:21:45] Speaker C: Yes, it's pre skeleton. It's pre skeleton, and it is part of the forensic anthropology department there.
[00:21:52] Speaker B: Does it have connections to law enforcement as well?
[00:21:55] Speaker C: Yes. It was kind of cool learning about this when I hooked up with one of the professors, the director of that program, and she was kind enough to help us figure out a way to do a research, proof of concept around this idea. But what I learned that normally they do is they're actually studying how a body decomposes outside in the open air and then studying that dirt under the body and what remains after the body has moved on to understand, often from a law enforcement perspective, how to study crime scenes and etcetera.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: That is an unusual department, I guess.
What other kinds of burial practices do people practice around the world? I don't know. I don't know. This is something you must have looked into as well.
[00:22:48] Speaker C: Yes. I mean, as I've mentioned, a lot of places in the world don't embalm. In fact, only in the US and Canada is embalming happening on any regular cadence.
In most of the world, the body is buried relatively quickly after a period, potentially, of refrigeration, which slows the decomposition process in a grave. In lots of places, including many parts of Europe, that grave is only rented. It's only used for a number of years. And once the majority of the body has decomposed, the bones are either removed or moved over down there and a new body goes in. So we think a lot of us, I think think of the US as like, this is just the way it's done everywhere. But we're pretty particular with our embalming and our one plot, one person forever.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: I mean, in Europe, our bodies put into caskets and, I mean, I think.
[00:23:44] Speaker C: Most of the time, but it really depends.
You know, the muslim faith, I believe, is typically the body is wrapped in a shroud and buried facing mecca.
So that's a form of green burial, if you will, or natural burial.
And like you mentioned, the jewish faith is very rarely embalms the body and is typically buried within a matter of hours into the ground directly, sometimes with a pine box or sometimes with a shroud or other natural material casket.
There's a pretty interesting zoroastrian faith practice, which is actually allowing vultures to eat the remains of the human body.
I believe that's practiced less and less because of the toxins in the human body. We're leading to the vultures dying, which is reverse. I mean, there really are some pretty interesting faith practices around the world.
We've gotten some pushback specifically from the catholic church, which has always been very interesting to me because I believe that we all can choose with open eyes and open hearts what we want for ourselves and work with our. And talk with our family and friends about what they want.
And we've definitely had the Catholic Church sometimes say, and I don't mean everyone who's Catholic at all, but some official response has been about disrespecting the human body because composting isn't respectful. And I think really, nothing could be further from the truth, in my opinion, which is the whole point. It's like, what we think is respectful is such a personal thing when it comes to death care.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, if, you know, if God created the world and is involved in all of this, then surely God can recreate the bodies of the dead when it comes time for the resurrection.
That's a theological point, I suppose that could be argued.
You just mentioned the heavy metals, and I was wondering whether there are any restrictions on where human compost can be spread and whether and what happens with those heavy metals and toxins.
[00:26:05] Speaker C: Well, we knew when we started, so I founded recompose in 2017 and worked with some really smart advisors. And we knew that, number one, we had to approach the law because it wasn't yet legal to compost. Humanity remains.
And so we started here in Washington state, and we knew that really, we would need to approach lawmakers and change the statute to allow human composting. And to do that, we knew we had to answer the question of safety, of course. Right? And so we asked ourselves basically three questions. Number one, what happens to pathogens, dangerous pathogens in the body? Number two, what about, like, Covid, for example? Number two, what happens to heavy metals? And number three, what about pharmaceuticals? That was a big question we were getting. What about all the pharmaceuticals we take, especially in the last days of our lives? Potentially, yeah. And so we did a pilot project with Washington state university's soil science department. It took us about nine months to set up this pilot because they had never done a cadaver donation program before. And they set up all sorts of committees, ethics committees, biosafety committees, etcetera, to make sure that we were following all the protocol that was necessary to make the study not only, like, rigorous, but also safe. And so we started this program.
We welcomed six human donors to the, to the pilot, and we composted their bodies and then tested for pathogens, heavy metals and pharmaceuticals. From that has come, number one, an understanding that composting is pretty incredible. It breaks down pathogens, but that's by the creation of heat through microbial activity.
That's how that is taken care of and actually really well researched and recorded in livestock composting research. So we knew that, but we showed it again with this pilot with heavy metals. We came in vastly underneath the EPA's requirements for heavy metals and with pharmaceuticals, we were pleased to see a 95% reduction.
And that was, I say, pleased because in reality, it turns out our bathroom use is much more a reason for pharmaceuticals in the. In the environment than our death care practices. So, because wastewater is where pharmaceuticals typically go. But we were still happy to see that composting was reducing these pharmaceuticals.
So we basically, like in the pipe, pathogens, heavy metals, and pharmaceuticals. And those results have translated to the regulations for how a human composting facility is regulated and inspected. So all facilities are expected to be recording the temperature to show pathogen destruction and then testing with a third party, the compost that's created.
And that testing includes both pathogens and heavy metals.
I guess that's a long way to say. There's a lot of testing and protocol that goes into making sure the resultant material is safe to use on plants and trees and like, as you would.
[00:29:34] Speaker B: A normal compost material, you mentioned third party testing.
Who does that?
[00:29:42] Speaker C: Well, there's companies out there that test compost, and so, in fact, we use a compost testing company. Yeah.
[00:29:50] Speaker B: Oh, well, that makes sense. You know, I was thinking, of course, you know, who does this? In the case of bodies. But that makes perfect sense. You're listening to sustainability now. This is your host, Ronnie Lipschitz, and my guest today is Katrina Spade, founder and chief executive officer of Recompose, a Seattle based green funeral home that composts human bodies and turns them into soil that can be applied in your garden if you so desire.
So, in preparation for today, I did listen to another interview, or I read another interview, I guess, and you mentioned that you wanted people to separate grief from the funeral experience and the industry.
Do you remember saying that?
[00:30:42] Speaker C: Why? Remember saying that? Tell me more, and hopefully it'll come to me.
[00:30:45] Speaker B: Well, you know, the industry tries to make people regard organized funerals as integral with grieving. And the more you spend. Right. The more your grief is articulated or the better the grief. From what you said, I understood you to say you want to separate the two. And I was wondering if you might talk a little bit about what you mean, how you think about that.
[00:31:10] Speaker C: Well, I'll say, to start, I definitely don't think that spending more means you have more, a better grief or a quicker grief, or you've honored your person more. I'm such a proponent of doing what is right for you and your person and your friends and family and chosen family. And I'll say that's kind of. I'd say that's the underpinning of recompose's ethos in the world, is we're giving a very. We're offering a very specific offering. You can see when you come to our website that our design is very.
Our work is designed forward, which means we have a point of view.
What we love to do within that point of view, though, is help people personalize the experience, customize the experience for themselves. And so, for example, we love our. I should say, when I say we, I'm usually talking about our services team, which is made up, actually, of funeral directors, licensed funeral directors, but who are taking a new spin on the funeral experience. They're licensed because that's the regulation we are under. And they are people who are really excited about changing the way the funeral industry works anyway. So some of you know, one of the things that makes us a little different is we really encourage folks, if they want to, to drive their person's body to us. If that's something that is exciting to you, we will help you do that. We'll help you get the permit you need to do that, and we'll welcome you at the door. We'll meet you there and take your person into our care. Then we also have a place in our facility in Seattle, which I love, called Cedar, which is a room that encourages intimate, quiet time, singing, prayer, washing of the body, still to be determined and designed by friends and family. We really wanted to create a place where people could have hands on this person for one last time before their form has changed and.
And can that place can really be used and that time designed by people in different ways.
And our funeral directors really encourage and sort of want to be there to support, but are never there to direct, if you will, even though they're technically funeral directors. It's all about letting us, as people, get closer to the idea of death when possible.
[00:33:37] Speaker B: Well, let's change the topic here. So when you started recomposed, composting of bodies was not legal in Washington state. So I'm wondering, what did you do to get that legislation passed, and how did it become legal in the few other states where it's now allowed?
[00:33:58] Speaker C: Yeah, it's legal now in twelve states, which is pretty cool, including California.
When we started, like I said, the first thing we did was begin that pilot study with Washington State University, because we suspected that it was important to prove the process was safe and effective. We did that first. I then went. I had coffee with a neighbor of mine. Senator Jamie Peterson is my state senator. And we had coffee at the local coffee shop, and I explained what I was trying to do, and he immediately got it.
He had been sponsoring a bill to legalize alkaline hydrolysis, also known as water cremation, which is another form of cremation that uses alkaline to dissolve a body instead of burn it. It's actually legal. I think it's now almost 30 states or something.
[00:34:52] Speaker B: Is that like lime?
[00:34:53] Speaker C: I think so. It's high alkaline solution and water. And again, it's a much less energy intensive process than cremation.
So Senator Peterson had been running a bill for a few years to legalize alkaline hydrolysis and said, oh, well, of course, we will add human composting to that bill, because they're both greener forms of funeral care.
And we found that we had such interest and excitement around human composting. Actually, the human composting sort of took the. Took the bill, and now alkaline hydrolysis is also legal in Washington state. But I went around Olympia. There's a very, you know, the. The capitol building is made entirely of marble. And I went around with a little baggie of wood chips, alfalfa and straw. That's what we compost bodies in. And a little baggie of cow compost because I couldn't ethically bring around a baggie of human compost, but I could ethically bring around a body, a little bag of cow compost. And I would say, this is the before and this is the after. And you about 15 seconds with each lawmaker, if that. And so that was my pitch. And I also talked about not only the environmental savings, but also talked a lot about this being about the land. And, you know, it's based on what farmers have been doing for decades. And so it really, in the end, ended up being a bipartisan bill. It wasn't just this, like, weird Seattle environmental bill. It was like, this is actually for anyone who cares at all about both the land that they live on, the environment around it, and then the people who they love. So it worked out pretty well. We then went, we did active work in California and Colorado, and then a lot of the bills since then have been driven by lawmakers, the people that are excited about the idea and supported by recompose. So, like, I'll have a conversation. I'll testify about regulations, help regulators figure out what they're trying to draft, but we're mostly supporting from the sidelines.
[00:37:02] Speaker B: Was there any opposition?
[00:37:05] Speaker C: There was. The Catholics were lightly opposed. When I say lightly, I mean the letter was sentence, but they, I think we're making themselves, their stance clear but not putting a bunch of energy behind it.
[00:37:22] Speaker B: Well, one of the things that I'd like to ask people about when they're engaged in this kind of sort of policy activity related activity is, what have you learned about the legislative process from your activities? Because it sounds like you're doing, you know, you did some lobbying and you've been doing some testifying, and I imagine there are other things that you've been doing. What have you learned from all of that?
[00:37:50] Speaker C: I think the biggest mystery that was unlocked for me was I never knew really what lobbyists were or did. And what I realized is that they are people who have a great deal of social capital within the capital with other lawmakers. And when you hire a lobbyist, they're going to spend some of their social capital to help you get done what you want to get done, for better, for worse. That's what lobbying is. And so we didn't hire lobbyists. We haven't had to hire lobbyists everywhere, but we did hire lobbyists in Washington, Colorado, and California. And I definitely appreciate and understand the reason for that and the value. I'm not sure I wish that's how it had to happen, but I understand the way it works now.
I mean, you probably know this. So many bills just run out of time. They're not opposed by anyone. They just don't have enough energy behind them to get them onto the schedule on the right day, etcetera. So they just, they almost. They die not from being opposed, but from a lack of momentum.
[00:38:59] Speaker B: Well, sometimes it's willful neglect.
The easiest way, right, the easiest way not to be shown, committed to anything is to simply let it sit there.
[00:39:09] Speaker C: So true.
[00:39:10] Speaker B: Clearly, from what you've said, the whole idea of human composting is probably becoming of more and more interest to people and more and more widespread. And I was wondering, who comes to recompose, to buy a funeral plan or to be decomposed?
[00:39:34] Speaker C: Well, I initially thought that everyone that would choose human composting would probably be a staunch environmentalist. And it's true that we have activist environmentalists. We've got scientists who've spent their whole lives working on a particular environmental issue. We have lots of gardeners, of course, who appreciate compost and know what soil is and what, what decomposition and how beautiful that is.
And then we also have a segment of the clientele that I would say is more.
They want something different than what exists in the world for funeral care. They don't want cremation. And they're not necessarily that excited about, like the funeral homes of old. And recompose is technically, we're a full, fully licensed, full service funeral home. And when you come to us, we take care of everything. You know, we're licensed funeral directors take care of the paperwork and the death certificate.
But we are, if you come to visit, which I welcome you to do, we give tours quite often. You can sign up on our website. We don't feel like a funeral home that you've ever been to, I'm pretty sure. So when you walk in the door, you'll hopefully think, ah, this feels different. And some of our clients choose us because we feel different.
What's cool about. I mean, our pre composed membership is a lot of young people, too. It's not just folks who are approaching the end of life. It's actually 20 something and 30 somethings and 40 somethings, etcetera, which I think says something about a little bit about the meaning behind it and the idea that you can just take a small stand for the end of life. Now, I don't know. I think it's probably tied up with the grief we all feel about climate change and the state of the world today.
But it's weirdly paradoxically, maybe somewhat comforting to think about our own end of life when we're facing so many big challenges.
[00:41:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I imagine it's a partial answer to the existential dilemma of why am I here?
Right, exactly. And correlates with the decline in organized religion as well.
But that's interesting.
Where do people come from? Where do your customers come from?
What do you call them? I don't want to say.
[00:42:06] Speaker C: I say clients most of the time.
[00:42:07] Speaker B: Okay, where do your clients come from?
[00:42:09] Speaker C: Well, a fairly large percentage come from out of state, out of Washington state, so a lot, the highest of which comes from California. Probably not surprised to hear that. And then we've got folks from all over the US, and a few have come internationally. At this point, you might think, like, how in the world does that happen? But it's not uncommon. Even before recompose, it's not uncommon for us to die in the wrong place and have to be shipped somewhere, our bodies shipped somewhere. So it's been pretty easy to work with a local funeral home to have them transport your body up to us in Seattle.
And we've worked with lots of Californians who've done that already. And then, like I mentioned before, some who've driven their own people, and that is, for them, I think part of the ritual of it. It's like, this is really important to them to be doing the delivery itself, and I'm not advocating for that necessarily, but I do love that we make room for it, and I, we can help you with that. It's quite a journey, you can imagine.
[00:43:12] Speaker B: So I imagine you've thought about how to spread or diffuse this practice, right? I'm not quite sure what else to call it. And what are your thoughts about that?
Since people are coming from all over the world, or at least all over the United States, presumably this would be of interest to people in other parts of the country. So for sure.
[00:43:36] Speaker C: I mean, my job as CEO, part of my job is to figure out how we can open new facilities. Part of that is raising, we raise investment from folks who are first and foremost mission driven and, like, really want to see recompose in more places.
So my job is to, you know, talk to people who might invest in recompose and then figure out how to, how to expand. And then we're also, well, there's two ways that we're also becoming more available around the country. One is our affiliate program, which is we work with select funeral homes in different areas so that they can offer recompose, but it still takes the transport of the body to us to actually have the process done. So that's our affiliate program, and then we also have a licensing program where we're working with, in conversation with, I should say, certain organizations that might want to actually open a facility in their neck of the woods. The challenge being it takes a fair amount of capital to do so. It's not an inexpensive facility to open. And so that's, I think, our biggest challenge today.
[00:44:47] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Katrina Spade, the founder and CEO of Recomposed, a Seattle based green funeral home that composts human bodies after death. We've just been talking about growing interest in this particular approach to post life conditions.
Well, earlier you mentioned that you sometimes distribute or pass out some of the compost to conservation organizations, and I meant to bring that up earlier, but I was sort of intrigued by.
By that. You said you have some program.
[00:45:28] Speaker C: Yes, our land program. It's something we're really proud of. We work with nonprofit organizations that are doing conservation and restoration and sometimes rewilding work. So those three types of projects, these are places that have land that is conserved, a team that, you know, work works to make that land, restore it. Most of the time, typically through our land partners, there's work being done to take mismanaged, maybe it was over forested land and has been mismanaged over time and restore it to a more wild form.
And we have through our land program, if a family chooses, they can donate the soil to that work. I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but we're creating a cubic yard of soil per person, which is a fairly large amount. And that's why part of why we created the land program is you might want just one bag of compost when your person dies, but you might want the other 20 bags going to the land program to do work.
[00:46:36] Speaker B: Those 20 bags, how big are the bags?
[00:46:40] Speaker C: Ten gallon bags. They're like what you would buy, you know, a bag of topsoil at the.
[00:46:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I don't imagine there's been any kind of commercial demand for that.
[00:46:50] Speaker C: We. I don't think probably, I know we wouldn't do that. I think in Colorado the law may stipulate you can't do that, so. But we wouldn't anyway.
[00:47:00] Speaker B: Most people, I guess, would. Would think that this is an unusual path to take in one's life. What you've been doing and what do you have to say to people who are looking for creative outlets for their interests and energies.
But are. I mean, did you think about this as a business when you started? And how would you encourage people, young people in particular, to sort of let their imagination go and creativity go wild?
[00:47:34] Speaker C: Well, I guess design school, for me was a great way to kickstart that and more than that, to kind of realize that design could be a profession, because I didn't know that before. And it took me a little while to figure it out and go back to school. But I never thought at the beginning, I did not plan on this journey at all. I thought I'd be an architect. And then the energy of the idea carried me along. And, I mean, to be fair, I suppose I carried the idea along with my own energy as well. It was a very mutual, mutually agreed upon journey that it was just like, it's so fascinating to keep investigating, solving little challenges as they come up. Then the big ones, you know, legalization and, I mean, fundraising, and there are some huge challenges, but they're all made up of smaller challenges. And what I realized early on was my job, like, bottom line job, is to meet the people that can help me move this forward, because I'm not an expert, actually, in any of this. And then there are these experts in law and biology and operations that can help you move something forward. So I've been just. I feel so lucky to be able to do this work. And it is quite, um, creative as an arc, as a journey, it's been quite creative. I'm not sure the everyday is as creative as it might sound, but, um, that's true for many jobs, I guess.
[00:49:06] Speaker B: Well, we. We don't ask people, you know, what, generally, what. You know, what their day looks like. Right. It's. It's more that the idea of. Of the arc, but I think also the. The idea of becoming part of this cycle. Right. This billion year old cycle, which is very inspiring, and that life will continue whatever happens to us.
Well, we're at the end of our time, and I want to thank you so much for being my guests on sustainability now.
[00:49:39] Speaker C: Well, thank you for having me. This has really been a very enlivening conversation.
[00:49:44] Speaker B: You've been listening to sustainability now. Interview with Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose, a Seattle based public benefit green funeral home that composts human bodies, turning them into soil that can be spread almost anywhere.
My interview with Katrina Spade ran a few minutes short, so I've inserted here an excerpt from my May 26 interview with University of Victoria professor James Rowe, author of Radical Mindfulness. Why transforming fear of death is politically vital. We're talking about the half billion year old chain of life and our place in it. I want to raise with you a proposition that I think is grounded in a kind of materialistic perspective. And that is, you know, and this comes out of, I suppose, Buddhism and other societies, is that life is everywhere and death is an illusion.
Okay. And I mean, but that's, it seems to me, articulated in a particular way that tries to, I don't know exactly give the psyche some role in coming to terms with that. And as I've been thinking about this, I'm going to be 72 in July. And so I am reckoning with my own mortality. It's not that humans don't die, but that in death they returned to the earth from whence they came, and they nourished new life in the soil. And that soil is being transformed from one material state to another. And this has been going on for half a billion years and will presumably go on into some indefinite future.
I mean, do you have any thoughts about that? Because that doesn't really rely. It relies on how we think about death, but it doesn't rely on any kind of elaboration on that notion that death is an end.
[00:51:45] Speaker D: Yeah, no, I agree completely with that formulation. I think that death is a transformation more than a finality.
We can understand that rationally at the conscious level, but I think still holds a lot of unconscious fear and resentment. And that's why I recommend mind body practices like meditation, ritual, ceremony. There's increasing interest in psychedelics as a way of relating to some of these anxieties, to begin embodying a deep affirmation of a life that will end, thereby making way for more life. And so that sort of materialist formulation that you provide, I think that that's a kind of narrative resource that can help quell some of our anxieties. But without embodied practices to speak to that subverbal realm and soothe some of those subcutaneous impulses, I think that they will persist. And so that's why I have the focus on mind body practices to engage with that deeper transformation.
[00:52:47] Speaker B: If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] sustainabilitynow and Spotify YouTube and Pocketcasts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make Ksquid your community radio station and keep it going. And so until next, every other Sunday, sustainability. Now.
[00:53:18] Speaker A: Find out temperate zones and tropic climbs and through currents and thriving seas, winds blowing through freezing trees, strongholds on safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find.
