To make composting of human remains the new normal in the funeral industry, the company Return Home has attracted millions in investment.
“Up to now, we’ve basically just been getting rid of human remains,” says funeral director Katie Houston.
During the pandemic, from January 2020 to October 2022, more than a million people died from COVID-19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control. Funeral homes were overwhelmed, including the company where Houston worked. She says that what she experienced during the pandemic now makes her current work feel like an easy walk.
Houston is now Director of Family Care at Return Home. It offers a service in which the body of the deceased is composted. And just as importantly, the company involves the bereaved throughout the process, guiding them through the emotional, heavy awareness of death’s inevitability. According to Houston, compared with traditional funeral services this is something completely new.
“We thought that by shielding people from what was happening, we were helping them, but in fact, by separating them from these rituals, we were only harming them,” says Houston.
She explains that a typical funeral provider will either embalm you or cremate you, or both, and then bury or cremate you. If you are buried in the traditional way, the deceased is put into some sort of container and the grave is lined with concrete. By the time the bereaved see you at the funeral, you are already covered in makeup.
All of this—especially embalming, which is not required by law—is done to make the process more sanitary and to make the body more aesthetically pleasing for the service (the body could simply be refrigerated instead). Houston believes this alienates the bereaved from the reality of death.
“Most people don’t believe things until they see them with their own eyes,” and when the person you see lying in the casket looks more or less alive, it affects how you grieve.
At least, this is the conviction at Return Home. The company has developed a process to make funerals more intimate, more emotionally engaging and, most importantly, more climate‑friendly—your body is transformed into 120 kilograms of soil.
Return Home is similar to several other such companies. They are particularly popular in Washington state, which in 2019 was the first to legalize “human composting.” Since then, 12 other states, including Maine, Colorado and several others, have followed suit. New Jersey may soon join that list. In 2023, the magazine “Mother Jones” called green burial a billion‑dollar industry waiting for its moment.
Meanwhile, Return Home, notes the company’s CEO and co‑founder Micah Truman, has already raised several million dollars to launch its operations and soon plans to raise even more to expand into states that have already legalized this practice. And he says this is only the beginning.
How it works
Although the company is based in Auburn, Washington, Return Home staff will transport remains from almost anywhere in America (except Alabama, where the law requires a body to be embalmed before it can cross the state line). The body is then placed in a vessel with alfalfa, straw and sawdust, and oxygen plus microbes break down the soft tissue in about 30 days.
After that, the body is placed in a machine that pulverizes the bones. Then everything is put back into the vessel, where the microbes can now also break down bones that would not otherwise decompose. Before this second round of composting, plastics and metals—such as dental fillings—are removed from the remains.
Families can receive and take home the soil produced by composting, or leave it in a conservation area, and they can sit at its boundary on a special bench inscribed “For those who have returned home.” For insurance reasons, the bereaved are not allowed into the conservation area itself.
But the most meaningful moments are experienced before and during the composting process itself. Before the remains are placed into the composting vessel, they are washed. If they wish, family members can do this themselves.
In Judaism and Islam, relatives wash the body before burial, sometimes even several times. For hundreds of years, in places such as the Scottish Highlands, it was a tradition for women to wash the body of the deceased and surround it with fragrant herbs before burial.
One mother told Houston: “The first bath he ever had in his life was in my hands, and I want to give him his last bath as well.” In October 2021—four months after the company opened—she was one of the first clients. She and other early clients helped Return Home realize that they could allow the bereaved to be part of every step—to wash the deceased, to place the body in the composting vessel, to take the remains out to break the bones in the special device, and then to return them to the composting container.
Clients can also use the company’s space in ways that are not typical of traditional funeral homes. In the public area at Return Home, families have held banquets and parties with dancing.
“I don’t want to dictate anything. If I set up chairs in rows, people will sit in rows. If I have an open space and I say, ‘Do whatever you want!’ they will do what their hearts desire,” says Houston.
One of the most meaningful rituals Return Home offers is called “laying in.” Before the first round of composting, loved ones leave various symbolic items with the body. The company provides a special station with materials people can use to make letters or cards.
Houston once found dozens of sunflower heads spread all over the body. “Only her little face was visible. It was incredibly beautiful,” she says. Another family placed a piece of wedding cake that had been in the freezer for 25 years with the deceased, and another left a lobster. Once the composting container is closed, it cannot be opened for 30 days, but during this time people still come to visit the deceased, and through the wall of the vessel they can feel the warmth generated by the microorganisms from the person’s gut that are breaking down the flesh.
“It softens the trauma of separation,” says Houston. It has significantly changed her relationship with grieving families. They form bonds during the planning of the ceremony, at the service itself, during visits to the deceased while the body is breaking down, and finally when they take the resulting soil home.
Houston had just flown to Reno to bring soil to a family. “I have so much healing social interaction with these families that my cup is being filled as much as it’s being emptied,” says Houston, adding that she used to feel drained.
“I’ve watched people go through this process in a much healthier way. I’m with them for 60 to 70 days instead of simply handing them an urn of ashes and saying goodbye as if to say, ‘See you when the next one of yours dies,’” says Houston, adding, “The hands that loved you in life should be allowed to love you after death as well.”
Return Home is created
The idea of composting the dead would not leave Truman alone.
Following his father, who worked at the United Nations, he grew up in Nairobi and the US. Before founding Return Home, he worked at a company that raised money in China for large real‑estate projects in the US. That meant regular travel between Seattle and Beijing.
In 2018, he came across an article in “The Seattle Times” about this industry that simply lets people decompose. “This is the last thing we do on this planet—maybe we want it to have some meaning.”
Truman doesn’t think he’s the only one who has been captivated by this concept.
“When people first learn about this concept, it 100 percent sticks in their minds—whether they like it or not,” says Truman. He, too, began to dig deeper into the issue, consulting scientists, and soon he was thoroughly absorbed by the idea. They started testing the composting process with pigs. Everything had to be carefully studied; they developed protocols and safety procedures.
The preparation took two and a half years and cost two and a half million dollars, which Truman invested himself. And given that this type of business is not common in the US, they had to design and adapt the equipment themselves. Among other things, that included a device that crushes bones into small fragments so that microbes can break them down in the second composting round. “Every component in there didn’t exist before,” says Truman.
Their first client was a woman burying her wife. Her grief seemed immense, and what they did made him realize the significance and weight of it all.
“You have a client saying, ‘My 16‑year‑old daughter has died by suicide. I want to put her into the vessel with my own hands,’” says Truman.
Each terramation, as the company calls the composting process, costs 5,450 US dollars. But it is free for those who died under the age of 18. In his previous job, Truman often felt he had to choose between doing a successful deal and doing the right thing. In this business, that dilemma does not arise.
But Truman’s primary motivation was initially environmental protection, especially reducing carbon emissions. For example, cremation uses about 130 liters of fuel and releases 400 kg of CO2.
Return Home has close relationships with funeral directors’ associations in many states. The associations have lobbyists who work with state legislators and fight for the right to turn into soil after death.
Truman says his business will expand along with the states that legalize this practice. For example, Minnesota legalized it last year. In California, human composting will become legal in 2027, and Truman’s company has high hopes for that state. He predicts that within the next five years, the company will have 10 locations.
Truman declined to share exact information on how much outside capital, beyond his personal investment, the business has raised, but says it is “several million.” And in the near future he plans to raise much larger sums needed to expand into Minnesota, Georgia and California.
Greening the funeral industry
Human composting is one of many more environmentally friendly alternatives to traditional burial and cremation that have become increasingly popular over the past five years, says Marion Friel, owner and director of the Chicago‑based company Green Burials of Love. One such alternative that requires less fuel is hot‑water cremation, which makes the body easier to process.
Green Burials also offers another option: the deceased is buried in a biodegradable container or a simple shroud—without all the traditional accessories associated with conventional burial that prevent the body from returning to the soil, Friel notes. At her company, she offers green burials with beautiful woven willow or hemp‑fiber caskets.
Friel also performs traditional funerals, which include embalming, making the deceased more acceptable to the eyes of the bereaved and easing the logistics. “Some people are more comfortable seeing the deceased if their appearance is closer to the image the bereaved knew in life.”
It must be borne in mind that if you want a green burial, certain embalming fluids cannot be used on the deceased. There is an ongoing dispute on this point, with one side insisting that embalmed bodies pollute the environment.
Usually, after embalming, you are placed in a casket, and then the cemetery digs a hole, lines it with concrete and places the casket inside. I had always thought that people were embalmed and buried in caskets to protect groundwater.
Although Friel and Houston claim that water pollution is not an issue, they also say there is another aspect of traditional burial that people usually don’t think about: lawns. Having just written a story about how our obsession with traditional lawns may be threatening our food supply, I was truly shocked.
They say that graves are lined with concrete and the body is placed in a casket to keep the ground level in the cemetery. Caskets give human remains a more or less controlled environment, and the concrete prevents the ground from sinking. This allows cemeteries to maintain a beautiful but planet‑killing lawn, prevent headstones from tilting and move equipment for digging graves around easily.
Friel says that in green burial cemeteries, or in green sections of cemeteries, which are much rarer, there is no lawn because the soil around the decomposing body settles. So caskets and embalming are not just about sanitation, because bodies can simply be refrigerated and the time for viewing can be shorter. This is exactly how Friel handles green burials. “You just need to hold the funeral in the morning, and the visitation doesn’t have to last six hours—two are enough.”
This aspect of funeral services helps maintain less environmentally friendly practices for handling remains: when the management of a cemetery in Washington, DC, let its lawn go brown to save water, it received dozens of angry calls from families, Houston says.
So, just like embalming, lawns, caskets and other things, we do all this simply because that’s how we’ve done it in the United States for a long time. But we don’t have to.
Houston says that when she provided traditional funeral services, that was exactly how she saw her role. In her view, it was a kind of opportunity to make people look better in death. Now she prefers that clients see their loved ones as they truly appear after death. “We tell the bereaved that they are still beautiful—they’re just dead.”
Houston and her colleague Brienna Smith are also trying to popularize green burial on social media. The company’s TikTok account has more than 600,000 followers.
Their first popular, spontaneously created video was a tour of the facility, posted in September 2021. It also helped introduce the public to their company and, through dialogue, explain how the company actually works.
“Literally everyone asks us what we do with the bones,” says Friel.
Originally published at https://inc-baltics.com/alternativa-tradicionalajiem-apbedisanas-pakalpojumiem/
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