Internet Has Mixed Reactions To New York Legalizing The Composting Of Human Bodies

shovel in compost

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With almost 20 million residents, the state of New York has officially introduced a new way to deal with all of the people who die every day: composting.

In 2020, the US Census Bureau reported that approximately 452 people die every day in the state of New York, and that was before the pandemic.

On Saturday, New York governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation which allows for natural organic reduction or terramation, AKA the composting of human bodies.

New York is now the sixth state in the country to allow this type of burial.

The others are Washington, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont and California.

According to the Associated Press

The process goes like this: the body of the deceased is placed into a reusable vessel along with plant material such as wood chips, alfalfa and straw. The organic mix creates the perfect habitat for naturally occurring microbes to do their work, quickly and efficiently breaking down the body in about a month’s time.

The end result is a heaping cubic yard of nutrient-dense soil amendment, the equivalent of about 36 bags of soil, that can be used to plant trees or enrich conservation land, forests, or gardens.

“Cremation uses fossil fuels and burial uses a lot of land and has a carbon footprint,” said Katrina Spade, the founder of Recompose, a full-service green funeral home in Seattle.

“For a lot of folks being turned into soil that can be turned to grow into a garden or tree is pretty impactful.”

Despite the fact that currently each year approximately 5.3 million gallons of chemicals, including formaldehyde, methanol, and ethanol get buried in the ground with corpses under the standard system of burial, not everyone is down with human composting.

“A process that is perfectly appropriate for returning vegetable trimmings to the earth is not necessarily appropriate for human bodies,” Dennis Poust, executive director of the New York State Catholic Conference, said in a statement.

“Human bodies are not household waste, and we do not believe that the process meets the standard of reverent treatment of our earthly remains.”

Reactions on the internet to New York legalizing human composting were also mixed.

“Awesome. And of course the religious were against it. Heaven forbid we return our valueless meat sacks back to nature to be useful,” another commented.

“Guess I won’t be getting food from there,” tweeted another.

For real.

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Before settling down at BroBible, Douglas Charles, a graduate of the University of Iowa (Go Hawks), owned and operated a wide assortment of websites. He is also one of the few White Sox fans out there and thinks Michael Jordan is, hands down, the GOAT.