Katrina Spade turns people into soil. At Recompose, a Washington funeral home, Spade offers an alternative to traditional burial and cremation — human composting. Recompose uses wood chips, alfalfa and straw to break down the body into a material much like typical garden soil.
The process takes 1/8 the energy output of conventional burial or cremation, and saves one metric ton of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. Spade hopes that this can have a small but meaningful impact on the environment — the death of one organism nurturing the life of another.