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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

Recompose, the country’s first human composting funeral home does it like this: a corpse is placed in a cylinder with organic materials, like wood chips, plants, and straw, then heated and turned repeatedly for several weeks with a hook until it’s broken down into a nutrient-rich soil that can be delivered back to the family or used for planting.

It's like what the mafia used to do to dissolve bodies

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I mean, why do all this theater when there is a much better long lived and respected tradition: Burial-at-Sea. Roughly 60% of the US pop lives within a 100 miles of a seacoast.

Wrap them in something organic for presentation, a weight stone, then, go out to sea (with family along option -others may be ok with remote video) and let them slip into the ocean like sailors buried at sea.

No creepiness, no vicarious cannibalism via eating veggies nourished by uncle Vinnie or aunt Mathilda or anything.

Traditional burial-at-sea.

As someone who lives in the middle of the United States, shipping my body out to the closest ocean for burial and flying family out to witness my burial doesn't seem very practical.

We have inland seas. The Great Lakes are vast and they can be barged out to sea (we’d need agreements with Canada; but feasible)

It may not be cost effective for some... but a large percentage (~60%) of the US pop live within a 100 miles from seashores...

My understanding is that the EPA does not allow you to dump human corpses in lakes. You also need to go >3 miles out to sea. https://www.epa.gov/ocean-dumping/burial-sea

Some entity was also probably not okay with composting bodies in your backyard —till this.

In California you can’t bury a corpse in your backyard either. But in most states you can.

I wonder how big of a trebuchet you’d need to launch a body 3 miles.

I don't even know if that's possible. 3 miles is a long way, and bodies are squishy and... easy to separate, relative to a rock or bullet.

The speed you would need to get that far might be high enough for the force to tear off limbs or to shred the skin. The chances of you getting a permit after you put "might rain human limbs or remains on the beach" is very low.

You'd probably have better luck with little solar-powered, GPS-guided dinghys or kayaks that can go out 3 miles, drop the body and come back.

Lake Superior is perpetually cold and near-sterile when you get deep enough. Not the greatest place if you want bodies to decompose.

What are the energy costs of transporting a body from inland out onto the ocean? Probably less than cremation I suppose. Still, with some slight modifications I think you could improve efficiency. Load the bodies into shipping containers, to take advantage of all that existing logistics infrastructure, then push the whole container over the side once the container ship is an appropriate distance from shore. You can even tell families that Vinnie and Mathilda have become an artificial reef.

Another pandemic, but this time with the Plague? No, please no shipping containers

Every year every person in US produces >10 tons of CO2, any energy required for their body disposal is irrelevant.

How about burial in a volcano? All natural cremation.

That could be an option for Hawai’i!

Parts of the body will decompose at different rates, so it won't be long before parts of the body will detach from the part that is weighted down. 7,000 people in the US die every day, 2.6 million a year. Random body parts from millions upon millions of corpses quickly find their way onto beaches everywhere, to the delight of sunbathers.

Was that reported around Leyte gulf and areas where thousands perished at sea? It may be a concern, but I’m not sure.

It's definitely a thing even without combat areas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Sea_human_foot_discov...

So if you scale up from the relatively small numbers of people who die (and whose bodies aren't recovered) by accident or suicide near/in water, it's probably reasonable to expect a lot more of this. Maybe your idea is workable if you go far enough out that any detached remnants are grabbed by the big oceanic gyres.

Or if the people buried at sea aren’t wearing anything too buoyant, such as sneakers.

I don't know about the WWII case, but in countries like the UK where it is legal to be buried at sea there are regulations about where you can perform the ceremony specifically because bodies do drift: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-guernsey-24224570

Although the article mentions that this is the first time it's happened in 25 years, note that only about a dozen people every year choose to be buried in this way: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-38210497

Well... Would be more like crepiness on steroids, "final dungeon boss level".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owKFlNU_T5w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7t1WguYJyE

I’m down with a “Viking funeral”. Yes, I know that the Vikings didn’t actually float their dead out to sea on perfectly good boats that were set on fire, but it’s still a cool idea.

This description seems unpleasant, especially the hook part. I expect they need some better description that doesn’t involve people picturing themself or their loved ones being torn up by a hook.

I didn’t even consider that as a possible interpretation. I thought of the hook as a crank to turn the cylinder. But now you have me questioning which is correct?

I personally pictured something similar to the dough hook attachment on my stand mixer

This earlier article is less ambiguous,

> Over the next 30 days, naturally-occurring microbes—and a few turnings with a tool similar to a dough hook—break the body down.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/93wmd5/the-first-us-funeral-...

That's pretty interesting. Does leave me with a different opinion on the service. Not sure if good/bad, just different.

Edit: after a few minutes of thought, I definitely like this less. Imagining my body like a pair of shoes banging around in the dryer or torn to shreds is not a great thought. In a way it's irrational. I don't think of cremation as my body in an inferno even thought that's what it is. I've always liked the idea of just having myself tossed in a hole and a tree planted over me. I've done this with my late dogs and it's always a joy to revisit the tree even after (especially after) years past. Gives me a feeling they are there still. It's odd but such is life, and death.

It sure ruins the illusion of "being at peace". Laying there and just slowly fading away? Peaceful. Getting stirred up so you break down faster? Ick.

I'll probably get over it but I had a similar visceral reaction.

I don't think the bodies will mind. I know mine won't when I'm gone. Sure some particularly squeemish family members might have an issue with it but as long as it's in the deceased's will, and they entrusted the right person as executor of estate, it shouldn't be a problem.

If it's legal by the time my clock is up I'd like a "burial" where they just throw my body into a forest and let nature take its course, but that one's probably gonna take a lot longer to be legal because of the worry that like, a coyote will drag an arm or something into a populated area. Previously my plan was to have my ashes pressed into a vinyl record of my music and distributed among friends and family but now this is a pretty appealing prospect.

Anyone interested in eco-death is probably well aware of this youtube channel but if not you should check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWo2-LHwGMM

The mental health of grieving loved ones seems like a reasonable thing to consider when selecting how handle one's remains.

My loved ones love me and know what I want. I can't speak for anyone else.

Yes, that is not great marketing copy.

But I suspect that if people knew what "embalming" means, they'd be squeamish about that as well.

...

I was present for a cremation sale where the funeral director explained that they fire the body, then collect any metals (titanium screws etc) and sell them for scrap.

This bothered me, but I can't say (still to this day) whether it was because it seemed way too graphic for the average bereaved family member, or if I was just offended that the crematorium thought it was OK to sell other peoples' property.

Could be worse. Check out this hog composting:

https://youtu.be/U9kw0A9_oCM

I doubt this helps put your concerns to rest, but some composting toilets use a manually cranked stirrer to mix the fecal matter with the existing compost materials.

See Nature's Head, for instance.

For anyone disturbed by the thought of a body being turned with a hook, consider who that person is since they died. My perspective is that they’re a memory in whoever remembers. They have lasting impacts to varying degrees. Now they are a collection of elements, much of which supports many other living things. I care that the body is processed in a way towards most ecological reciprocity, whatever that may be for that region of the world.

Treating our dead with respect is probably one of the oldest signs of human culture. People care a lot about the bodies of their deceased loved ones. See Antigone by Sophocles. You're welcome to your views, but most people have strong, deeply felt emotions and opinions on how dead bodies should be properly handled.

Things like this, though, show that those attitudes are changing. Not rapidly, and certainly not in a majority of people, but they are indeed changing.

If this seems disrespectful, then I encourage you to look into what the embalming process actually entails, as (IMO) it's worse: https://youtu.be/B5-NtLmKUDE?t=201

Mummification is even worse than that, but it had a perceived benefit for its proponents.

I respect the bodies, and the land, water, air, and other bodies that made them, which is why I prefer my remnants be digested by microbes with minimal resource-cost so long as it is safe enough for the land. We’re so spoiled with luxuries like embalming and fancy boxes. Abstraction layers may still feel like respect, but they distance us from the core of survival, which is the health of the other living things here. How can we shift our strong, deeply-felt emotions around dead bodies?

Your phrasing is very interesting: "consider who that person is since they died." It's interesting because you refer to the dead person in the present tense, "who it is," not "who it was". Yet, in the following sentence you say "they are a collection of elements." Even when attempting to state "cold hard facts," we cannot help but exhibit our humanity, and it's a reminder why we should treat the dead with respect. In my opinion, being alive is more than just a collection of atoms and the interactions between them. And in death, while the electrons stop moving in that particular way that made us alive, that "something special" still remains in the form of their memory.

That was intentional, nodding to the dead living on in living memory.

I’m okay with the spark of life being a result of a collection of stuff and the interactions amongst it all.

I treat the dead with respect because I’m my own panopticon.

This is abhorrent, as if it was taken unironically out of a dystopian science fiction novel.

Decomposition is a natural process that happens to any corpse. It does not need to be optimized. That said, it does not need to be slowed down with embalming either.

It actually is used in at least one sci fi novel, although not at all dystopian, Becky Chambers 3rd wayfarer novel: Record of a spaceborn few. I read the first 3 and highly recommend them, the world (universe?) building is wonderful, and the characters are sympathetic and well written. I'm saving the next one for when I next feel down, there's only 5, don't want to finish them too soon!

I believe that there was someone in the Mafia whose procedure was not unlike the modern lye hydrolysis methods -- heat, pressure, and a basic solution. Rendering took only hours, supposedly, an efficient method of Llupara bianca.

Wow, the whole process only takes several weeks?

A simple backyard compost will go through chicken bones quite well once it gets going. I'm not surprised an optimized process can take care of a whole body in a matter of weeks.

What do they do with the skeleton?

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