Dust to dust, ashes to … veggies? If you live — make that die — in Washington state, allowing your earthly remains to be converted to mulch is now a serious option. Fox News reports:
Gov. Jay Inslee, the Democrat from Washington, signed a bill into law on Tuesday that allows the composting of human bodies as an alternative to burials and cremations.
The Evergreen state is the first state to approve the measure after an earlier trial study that involved six backers who agreed to the organic reduction. The results were positive and the “soil smelled like soil and nothing else.”
Troy Hottle, a fellow at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, told The Seattle Times earlier this year that the method is as “close to the natural process of decomposition [as] you’d assume a body would undergo before we had an industrialized society.”
In a sense, I suppose, arranging to be composted is not all that different from donating your organs or leaving your body to science, except in this case you end up as a tomato in someone’s salad.
Considering the high cost of burial or even cremation, which runs into the hundreds, you might even think of composting as an opportunity to leave more of your wealth to your heirs.
