When Michelle Skaff dies, she’s going to turn into dirt.
The 31-year-old is a client of Return Home, a Seattle-area human composting facility. Its futuristic-looking vessels full of organic material like straw, alfalfa and sawdust can turn human bodies back into soil by mimicking natural decomposition processes, the company says.
Skaff is very much alive, and plans to be for a long time. She signed up for the company’s “pre-planning” services, starting a payment plan that’ll enable her to eventually become compost.
The reason: Burials and cremations carry heavy environmental tolls. Burials require embalming bodies in toxic solutions, plus an indefinite use of land, and cremations result in millions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually.
Over the last 15 years, the rate of cremation in the U.S. almost doubled, to 57%.
Many of human composting’s advocates are relatively young. The first five people to sign up for Return Home’s pre-planning services were under age 35, according to CEO Micah Truman.
At Recompose, another Seattle-based facility, 25% of pre-planning clients are between 20 to 49 years old, says founder Katrina Spade. That’s a lot for a service primarily devoted to the recently deceased.
For some clients, these companies present unparalleled opportunity. Experts who study decomposition and the environmental impact of dead bodies agree.
“My first reaction was: Why haven’t we done this before?” says Jennifer DeBruyn, an environmental microbiology professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “It’s not really a new idea. It’s just new-ish that we’re applying it to humans.”