In Business, Creating Sustainable Enterprises & Communities

ECOLOGICAL FUNERALS

In Business, March-April, 2006, Vol. 28, No. 2, p. 23

A new business, being developed in Sweden, is described in a book called Stiff. The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, whose next to last chapter is entitled: “Out of the Fire, Into the Compost Bin and Other New Ways to End Up.”

Mary Beth Kirkham

I LEARNED about ecological funerals in Stiff. The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (Norton, New York, 2003), loaned to me by my niece who read it when she took anatomy as a first-year medical student. The book is by Mary Roach, a journalist, who traveled the world to find out about methods of burial and uses of cadavers. She writes with a gentle and dignified humor. The next to last chapter is entitled, “Out of the Fire, Into the Compost Bin. And Other New Ways to End Up.”
Ms. Roach states that the modern human compost movement is located on a tiny island of Sweden, Lyrön, due west of Gothenburg. This is the home of Susanne Wiigh-Masak, who has founded a company called Promessa. It seeks to replace cremation, the choice of 70 percent of Swedes, with “a technologically enhanced form of organic composting” (p. 261). The King of Sweden and the Church of Sweden approve of her method. She has major corporate support and an international patent. The body is freeze-dried and then easily shattered by vibration. The pieces can be “used as compost for a memorial tree or shrub, either in a churchyard memorial park or in the family's yard” (p. 262).
Ms. Wiigh-Masak is an environmentalist and says (p. 263), “Compost should not be ugly. It should be lovely, it should be romantic. Death is a possibility for new life. The body becomes something else. I would like that that something else be as positive as possible.” She believes that nothing organic should be treated as waste, but it should be recycled.
“The crematoria in Sweden are facing new environmental regulations for volatized mercury from dental fillings, and many need to make costly upgrades to their equipment (p. 267). By purchasing Ms. Wiigh-Masak's machinery, they would save money, and, at the same time, comply with governmental regulations. Liquid nitrogen, used to freeze bodies, costs less than natural gas.

FREEZE-DRYING AND COMPOSTING
“The patent for freeze-drying bodies belongs to an American, Phillip Backman (p. 271). The first person to compost a body is also an American, Tim Evans. As a graduate student at the University of Tennessee, Evans “investigated human composting as an option for third-world countries where the majority of the people can't afford coffins or cremation” (p. 264). Evans co-authored a white paper on the practical advantages of human composting and said, “[the] material can be safely used in land applications as a soil amendment or fertilizer” (p. 265). Ms. Roach said, “[Evans] envisions families planting a tree or shrub, which would take up the deceased's molecules and become a living memorial” (p. 265). Evans said, “This is as close as science is going to get to reincarnation” (p. 265).
“The attention that Promessa has received in Sweden since its founding in 2001 has 'forced the funeral industry to deal with the possibility that very soon people may be coming to them requesting to be composted' (p. 274). In a Swedish newspaper poll taken in 2002, 40 percent of respondents said they would “like to be freeze-dried and used to grow a plant” (p. 274). Scandinavia's largest mortuary corporation plans to add a link to Promessa on its Web site (p. 276). The funeral directors recognize that this has to be done for economic reasons. The young people in Sweden are moving away from cremation because of the pollution it creates.
“Ms. Wiigh-Masak says that Promessa's main concern is the environment, and composting is 'a vehicle for spreading the gospel of ecology' (p. 270). Ms. Roach concludes, as she is standing over a rhododendron bush fertilized with a composted cow, Ms. Wiigh-Masak test grave, “[I]t's great, this quest for an ecologically sound, meaningful memorial' (p. 277).”

Prof. Mary Beth Kirkham is in the Department of Agronomy at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.