On the way back to being dust

Our impoverished spirituality around death and burial has been well documented in the Century, among other places. From the corpseless memorial service to the private lowering of embalmed bodies into concrete vaults, we are forever distancing ourselves from the realities of death and decay. Then there are the related practical issues: there isn’t enough land to keep burying people this way. And cremation presents environmental problems of its own.

Katie Herzog reports on an ambitious idea: a proposed human composter, which would hurry the dead along to a future as nutrient-rich soil. It’s essentially a compost bin at the scale of a multistory building, with bodies on the top floor and dirt on the bottom:

Bodies would be prepared and interned at the site, and you could hold memorial services and come back later to visit, just as you would with a traditional graveyard.