NSW set to consider human composting from 2027

In an Instagram video after being diagnosed with cervical cancer, Morgan Haigh captured herself walking through the old-growth forests of America’s north-west coast, laughing, crying and soaking up sunlight on her face after completing a round of radiation therapy. “Nature, thank you. I love you. You are me and I am you,” she wrote in the caption.When she died one year later, the 32-year-old made good on her belief in being at one with the earth. Her body was transported to a small industrial shed

south of Seattle, placed on a bed of lucerne, hay and sawdust, sealed in a specially designed heated “vessel”, and over the next two months broken down into half a cubic metre of nutrient-rich soil.Some bags were spread around Portland’s Mount Tabor in April this year, while some have been reserved to repot hibiscus plants at her father Todd’s home in Florida this month. “This is circle of life stuff,” Todd says. “We all shared her in life, and now we can share her energy.

She lives on through this.”A relatively new addition to a death industry dominated by cremations and burials, the process is known as “terramation”, “natural organic reduction” or, more bluntly, human composting. It is only legal in Germany and 14 US states. However, the Herald can reveal human composting is likely to be permitted in NSW following a months-long secret lobbying campaign.Even the scheme’s biggest backers acknowledge it’s an idea that takes some time to get your head around. “My initial response when I heard about

it was ‘ummmm, what?’,” says independent Sydney MP Alex Greenwich.“But when you think about it, it really does make sense. Our bodies are organic matter, and I think there is something beautiful about having the option of being able to return to the earth as organic matter after we die.”Greenwich, who has been exploring the idea for nearly a year and recently visited the Return Home facility in Seattle, will introduce a bill legalising human composting on Thursday. Greenwich is hopeful the Minns government will

support it and will work on any amendments, clearing the way for it to become available from 2027.Each provider has their own twist on the technology behind the composting vessels, how long it takes, and what support is offered to grieving families.At Return Home in Washington state, 74 vessels resemble no-nonsense freezer chests stacked three-high on large steel shelves. Earth, a composting company serving the New York market, uses 126 sage green vessels lined up in rows at a 37,000-square-foot warehouse. And at Recompose, circular

steel tubes slide into a large white wall where they are rotated once a week and monitored by a sophisticated computer system.“The underlying concept is simple; a lot of gardeners use it every day,” says Recompose founder Katrina Spade, who pioneered human composting a decade ago and light-heartedly refers to her vessels as “hotels for the dead”.Recompose has composted 700 clients in five years and has thousands signed up for when they die. They are of all ages, come from across the political spectrum, and

are urban and city dwellers. “Many are hungry for innovation in the death care space because cremations or burials are all we’ve had for so long,” Spade says.The new form of death care is creating new rituals. One of Spade’s most memorable moments was when Wayne Dodge, a Seattle physician and lifelong gardener with a love for Japanese maple trees, was composted following his death in 2021 due to complications from a severe spinal cord injury. When the soil was ready, neighbours and friends came

with five-gallon buckets to bring some of him home. “One of them said, ‘now I’m still gardening with Wayne’,” Spade recalls.“It was a beautiful moment. That soil is sacred in some ways. But it’s also just great compost. It’s precious but it’s not, and I love that.”Dodge’s sister, Marie Eaton, says the process opened up new ways to grieve. “I still cry about him. But there’s something healing for me knowing that he’s back being part of the earth again, and I can go to

a tree in my yard and I know he’s there.”Much like the duopolies of Coles and Woolworths, Telstra and Optus, and Qantas and Virgin, burials and cremations have until recently been the only options available for the essential business of body disposal.“So many people don’t like to think or talk about death despite it being something that we will all face,” Greenwich says. “And because we don’t like to talk about it, we haven’t really innovated in relation to it.”About 1146 people die in NSW

each week, or 60,000 per year. The national annual death rate is expected to climb to 300,000 in 2050.Teresa Russell, a former registered nurse who has been working with Greenwich on the bill, says the next decade will see more Australians die than in any previous decades, and new options are overdue.“One of the most important things that this legislation’s going to do is make people talk about death,” she says. “It’s really important to get rid of the taboo surrounding death because it happens

to us all.”Given land shortages and surging costs for burials, the cremation rate has surged in NSW to reach 70 per cent in metropolitan Sydney and 75 per cent in regional NSW. A burial in Sydney can cost between $17,700 and $23,000, and a cremation between $4000 and $9900.Human composting is priced somewhere between cremation and burial. Return Home charges $US5450 ($7700), and Recompose has a $US7000 fee. But perhaps its biggest edge over traditional methods is environmental.Embalming – which started in the US to

transport dead soldiers back to hometowns during the Civil War – uses formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, posing risks to funeral industry workers and groundwater.No figures are available for Australia, but each year the US requires 30 million board feet (a piece of timber one foot in length and width, and one inch deep) of hardwoods for coffins, 1.6 million tonnes of reinforced concrete for vaults, and 90,000 tonnes of steel for caskets.Cremation, which produces temperatures of up to 1000 degrees, emits around 160 kilograms of

carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and uses enough gas to power a single-person household for a month.Recompose estimates human composting prevents about one tonne of carbon pollution compared to cremation or burial.Russell suspects the environmental benefits of composting may not be a primary driver of why people choose it. “I think it’s a values thing,” she says. “I just think it aligns with people’s values, and just one of those values can be environmental care.”A natural burial field at Kemps Creek, in which bodies are

prepared without chemicals and placed in a biodegradable coffin without headstones, is now the final resting place of 71 people. Another field will open at Macarthur shortly.Body composting is legal in 14 US states. Bills to legalise it have been introduced in more than a dozen others.The movement enjoyed a surge in interest in the United States last year when billionaire home-maker Martha Stewart said she wanted to be composted on her farm. “It’s not going to hurt anyone,” she said. “It’s my property.”Others are

less enthused. The New York Catholic Conference fought against legalisation, arguing composting was “more appropriate for vegetable trimmings and eggshells than for human bodies”.“Human bodies are not household waste; they are vessels of the soul,” the state’s bishops said in a statement. “[We] do not believe the process meets the standard of reverent treatment of earthly remains.”But the church is also lukewarm on cremation and only endorses it provided the ashes are interred in a cemetery or designated area. It does not condone ashes being

scattered in the air, on land or at sea.Greenwich does not know how the church will respond when his bill is introduced in NSW but says composting is not taking away existing options. “This is simply just providing an alternative for people who don’t want to go through the processes of cremation or burial.” Composting, he argues, is essentially a cousin of cremation.In the US, Recompose founder Spade says her firm has composted Catholics and had Catholic priests come to bless a person’s body and

later, the soil.“There’s definitely been talk about human composting being disrespectful somehow, and I would argue that the practice of embalming could be looked at in the same way,” she says. “The practice of cremation could be seen that way. This is really about providing choice.”Greenwich’s bill will be open for consultation and he wants to hear all opinions. Under regulations proposed to be enforced by NSW Health, a person can’t be composted if the method is against their wishes, bodies must be composted separately,

and bodies with serious infectious diseases will not be eligible.A spokesman for NSW Health Minister Ryan Park said the bill will be considered by the government’s caucus and cabinet.Russell expects some of the big players in the funeral industry will jump in once composting becomes legal in Australia. She will seek to open her own not-for-profit facility, Earthly Legacy, should the bill pass.“If you don’t have a faith tradition and you have no real idea of what happens after we die, there’s something deeply grounding

– no pun intended – about knowing that at the very least my physical body will join something much bigger than my individual self,” Russell says.“It’s new, and it’s something special. This is an exciting moment.”

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