Placed into the ground in a wicker casket and shroud, you can decompose into nature at Spokane's green cemetery | The Spokesman-Review

By sprinkling dried roses over her late husband’s grave, Wendy Franklund Miller believes the flowers will become one with him as they decay.

That might be literally true. When buried in the cemetery two years ago, Jake Miller was placed directly into the ground with no casket and no preservatives – just a wicker basket and a shroud.

“He gave these flowers to me, and now I’m giving them back,” Miller said. “He’s just right there under the ground, so the flowers become a part of him. And it’s just a very warm, wonderful feeling to go visit him.”

The practice of allowing the body to naturally decompose is called green burial. It is just the kind of burial the vast majority of people throughout human history had received before the invention of the modern cemetery. As these conventional burials become less popular, green burial is one of many burial methods popularized in recent years to reduce one’s own ecological footprint in death.

“No embalming. Burial within 24 hours. But still with meaning, dignity and reverence for the body,” said Sam Perry, education director for the national Green Burial Council.

In contrast, conventional burials are a “very Western way of disposition” that a majority of the world still does not practice, Perry said.

“Embalming, putting the body in a metal casket and protecting it with a cement vault – it makes cemeteries look very much like a golf course,” he said.

That form of burial was first popularized in the United States after the Civil War, when an embalmed Abraham Lincoln was toured across the country by train.

“Embalming was used as a way to bring back the bodies of solders,” Perry said. “But it was really solidified when Lincoln’s body was put on a train and shown in all the major cities. It was really after that that people saw this process as a needed thing – as something that was worth paying a lot of money for.”

Recent decades have shown a precipitous decline in these conventional burials. A majority of Americans who die today are cremated. But with this shift in thought, certain other forms of burial have also become popular.

The Millers always imagined their bodies would be cremated when they died. But after Washington state legalized human composting – another green funerary practice that turns bodies into a nutrient-rich mulch – the couple became much more keen on a different kind of final resting place.

Soon after Riverside Memorial Park opened a green burial section of the cemetery, the Millers made their plans to be buried there. Neither expected the plot to be used soon, but Jake unexpectedly died a few months later following complications with routine heart surgery.

Visiting the grave in late October, Wendy was celebrating her late husband’s birthday. He would have been turning 81 – the same age she is now. She planned to come back a few days later to bring him a cake.

“He was always the younger man in my life,” she said. “I was in Spokane for school. I wasn’t going to stay. But then I met Jake, and I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.”

Despite her Parkinson’s disease, Wendy Miller reached his gravesite by herself – only with the aid of a walker and crutch.

“We were married 45 years,” she said. “He was just a fun-loving person. He was a lawyer and a beekeeper, and he was kind.”

Jake’s grave is tucked at the back of the cemetery, past where many passersby may have thought the cemetery ended. Beyond the manicured lawns and inside a thicket of pines lies Forest Grove, a fully natural section of the cemetery that opened a little more than three years ago.

The cemetery within the cemetery only allows natural, biodegradable products within it. Because of these restrictions, conventional burials with embalming and a nonbiodegradable casket are not allowed. All graves are dug by hand, and all headstones are made of local basalt.

Forest Grove is primarily composed of green burials but also allows composted or cremated human remains.

Fairmount Memorial Association CEO David Ittner said they opened Forest Grove in June 2021 for those seeking to limit their environmental impact in death.

“Many of our families do consider their impact on the environment,” he said. “When you look at all these burial options, there are inputs in your carbon footprint associated with it.”

Green burial provides the smallest environmental impact, followed by human composting, cremation and then conventional burial. Heritage Funeral Home, which services Fairmount Memorial cemeteries, also provides alkaline hydrolysis – a form of cremation using highly pressurized water that is more environmentally friendly than a typical cremation.

According to Ittner, Riverside Memorial had unofficially allowed green burial in the cemetery’s undeveloped land since it was first constructed in 1888. By formally adopting the practice, the cemetery would bring greater awareness to the option, as it became something people often requested.

“Just like any company, we pay attention to consumer preferences and this ecologically minded burial is definitely a trend we’ve seen,” he said. “Green burial is about as green as you can get. There’s no real process associated with it, other than simply placing the body in the ground. And so I think families really do appreciate that their last act of love for their family member is also something positive for the environment.”

About 100 interment rights to specific plots of land have been sold in Forest Grove, and 20 individuals have been buried there.

While many cemeteries informally practice green burial, only 400 across the country have been certified by the Green Burial Council. Forest Grove is the only certified green burial site in Eastern Washington. That number is much higher than when the Green Burial Council formed in 2005.

Working in the industry as a funeral director, Perry has seen green burial turn from “sort of a joke” to something funeral homes want to provide.

“The more and more people are finding out that it’s an option, it’s something they want,” Perry said. “It’s only been in the last few years the industry has shifted from thinking this was just a fad to seeing it as a legitimate option.”

Washington state has been at the forefront for much of these changes, but a lot of that innovation comes from a different green funerary practice.

Composting was first conceived as a way to safely dispose of livestock carcasses.

Washington State University soil science professor Lynne Carpenter-Boggs said composting is a “relatively inexpensive” process that can be done on-site at farms. This “minimizes the biohazard” of the dead livestock and leaves the farm with a nutrient-rich mulch for any crops.

Carpenter-Boggs was the first researcher to study how the composting process could be used on human bodies. But the idea first came from Katrina Spade, who is CEO of one of the largest companies providing human composting services.

More than 10 years ago, Spade was in graduate school for architecture and became “disillusioned” while thinking of her own mortality.

“Especially for dense cities, there really wasn’t an option that was gentle for the planet when we die,” Spade said. “And I stumbled upon some research into how farmers use composting to gently recycle farm animals back to the earth. And that idea is something a lot of people might want, too.”

Spade brought the idea to Carpenter-Boggs, and they conducted a pilot study in 2017 where six donated bodies were composted. Carpenter-Boggs called the finished product a “really lovely compost” that was safe for loved ones to handle.

Washington became the first state to legalize the practice as a legitimate form of final disposition, and it has since been legalized in 11 other states. As of the end of October, 714 human bodies have been composted in Washington state, according to the Department of Licensing.

Four companies in Washington are licensed to conduct human composting, including Spade’s company Recompose. All four companies are based on the West Side of the state, and bodies are shipped from across the country to undergo the other kind of green burial.

The body is placed into a specialized vessel, and over the course of 60 days is decomposed into a fine soil. A mixture of wood chips, alfalfa and straw is placed into the vessel along with the human body.

“The body is cocooned in this mixture of plant material,” Spade said. “And what we’re doing is creating the perfect environment for naturally occurring microbes to break down the body.”

These microbes create heat in the vessel, often bringing it up to more than 130 degrees Fahrenheit as they eat away at the body. This initial process takes approximately a month. At that point, the soil is removed and passed through a screen to collect bones or large nonorganics such as a titanium hip. Bones are then ground down and mixed back in.

There is then another month in which the mixture is allowed to cool, and microbes can finish any breaking down of the organic material. At the end of the process, approximately 1 cubic yard of soil is produced per person.

“Our clients at Recompose have used that soil to nourish their rose gardens or plant a tree and honor their person,” Spade said.

This is the same process used on animals. The primary difference in human composting is the soil is derived from a unique individual, while animals are typically composted together, Carpenter-Boggs said.

The WSU researcher plans to use the process she helped create on her own body after death.

“I see no reason for embalming,” Carpenter-Boggs said. “I spend a lot of my time outside, and I’m comfortable with how bodies naturally degrade in the environment. I not only accept, but I love that we are all still animals. And as a soil scientist, I love that I could help to nurture the earth.”

Recompose is not in the funeral business. Clients book their services online, and the families can do whatever they wish with the composted remains once they are shipped back again. One thing they can do with their loved ones is bury them in Forest Grove.

Heritage Funeral Home partners with Return Home, a rival composting company to Recompose. The Spokane funeral home will ship the body to Return Home’s Seattle-based facility to undergo the 60-day composting process.

According to Return Home outreach director Nicole Steinberg, Heritage is one of many funeral homes they partner with to provide this service. While Return Home can be contracted with directly, the company believes many still want the personal touch of a local funeral home.

“We partner because folks trust their local funeral provider and they feel comfortable there,” Steinberg said. “Our main goal is to help families in any way we can in their time of loss.”

The cost of human composting varies between companies and partner funeral homes. At Heritage, the composting itself costs $7,000, but it could be more, depending on whether the family wants a burial plot at Forest Grove. Green Burial at the cemetery starts at $5,000.

Companies like Recompose and Return Home pitch themselves as an environmentally sustainable form of final disposition.

“We hear a lot from people that they just want to be a tree when they die,” Steinberg said. “This really is the only way that you could actually become the tree. Here at Return Home, we say ‘Live, die, repeat.’ Because the nutrients of the body then go back into the plant matter that we place the soil with.”

But it is all a matter of degrees. Composting is much better for the environment than conventional burial with its formaldehyde and concrete. Composting, however, still has an environmental impact.

There is a lengthy process requiring an industrial facility and a lot of energy. It is for these reasons the Green Burial Council does not include composting in its guidance.

“There is byproduct,” Perry said. “The straw, the wood chips have to be farmed and acquired. There are additives that go into it. You have to create the environment for that service to even take place. That has its own environmental harm.”

In contrast, green burial has no process. The body is simply placed into the ground. Human composting “just doesn’t fit in” with what the Green Burial Council does.

Still, Perry said he personally finds the process “very appealing.” It provides a more ecologically minded solution for those who live in urban areas whose communities may not have the space for green burials.

While Miller and her late husband opted for traditional green burial in Spokane, their Seattle-based son is considering being composted after death.

“I volunteer in Discovery Park within Seattle, and as a forest steward, I plant a lot of plants, a lot of trees,” Peter Pulliam said while visiting his father’s grave with his mother.

“So that idea of becoming a tree just really fits with a lot of the things I do in my life.”

Pulliam had also found the green burial process “quite profound and beautiful.”

Wendy is eager to join her husband so they can be together forever in a much closer way than they would be in two separate coffins.

“Maybe I’ll be a part of him next year,” she said. “Maybe it’ll be 10 years down the road. But I know that I will get to be near him, and that makes me feel very warm.”

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