At the end of a busy, noisy street south of downtown Seattle, one building stands out from the warehouses and industrial businesses thanks mainly to its colorful mural and lush front garden full of trees, ornamental grasses and other plants.
The greenery makes it easier to find Recompose, and in a way it provides a reassuring calm to know that this is the spot where a groundbreaking form of death care is taking place.
“You don’t have to wonder what it’s about,” said founder and CEO Katrina Spade. “It’s about nature and returning to it.”
And it’s poised to spread.
Five years after Washington became the first state to legalize human composting, with Spade and Recompose leading the way, 13 more states have approved natural organic reduction, as it’s formally called. And Spade is eyeing the chance to expand to other parts of the country and world.
The company, which has raised $22.5 million to date, has attracted about $3 million in a current funding round that will help Recompose grow beyond Seattle, possibly through a franchising model.
Design with purpose
Recompose provides many of the services of a typical funeral home, but at first glance the inside of the 20,000-square-foot facility on South Idaho Street has the look and feel of a successful tech startup.
The front welcome area is thoughtfully designed and decorated with live-edge wood on the reception desk and an artful backdrop of preserved greenery. There are plants everywhere, free stickers that say, “Compost me when I die,” and assorted meeting rooms with names like Cedar and Moss.
Families can gather for quiet reflection with their loved one in one room and for a larger memorial service in another. That space features a “threshold vessel,” where a person is passed through from a place where they have existed in one form to the place where they will be composted.
“Design and communication through design has really been a leading tenet of what we’ve done here,” Spade said.
Founded in 2017, Recompose opened a temporary facility in Kent, Wash., several months after legalization in 2020. In 2022 they moved to SoDo, across the street from a Recology recycling facility, which Spade nods to as an ironic coincidence.
The company, which competes with green funeral services provided by Earth Funeral and Return Home in Washington, offers an alternative to traditional burial and cremation services that make up the bulk of the $20 billion U.S. funeral industry.
Recompose has served more than 600 individuals so far — with about 20% coming from out of state — and is seeing quarterly and yearly growth. A “Precompose” program in which people can pay into a funeral trust to cover the $7,000 expense, has more than 2,000 active participants.
“That’s kind of an indicator, because those 2,000 Precomposed members span from 20 years old all the way up into the 90s,” Spade said. “Young folks are inspired by the idea and want to take a tangible action toward a better, healthier planet.”
Along with those inspired by the environmentally friendly aspect of human composting, those who choose the process include everyday nature lovers and outdoorsy types. At one ceremony, Spade said friends and family added freshly harvested red peppers and purple onions to be composted in the mix with an avid gardener.
A human touch
Recompose’s natural organic reduction process works by converting human remains over about a 30-day period. The body is placed in a tubular receptacle with organic matter such as straw, wood chips and alfalfa and natural processes break everything down into about a cubic yard of compost — enough to fill the bed of a pickup truck.
There are three distinct stages involved in turning a body into reusable soil:
- Vessel stage. The body is “laid in” with a carefully calibrated recipe of plant material that provides the right blend of carbon and nitrogen. The springiness of the straw good for air flow and a fan system helps pull air and necessary oxygen through the vessel. The natural breakdown generates its own heat, and temperature probes provide incremental readouts. By law, the heat in the vessel has to hit 131 degrees Fahrenheit for three consecutive days — the magic number for ensuring all end material is free of pathogens. During this stage the vessel is rotated at times to increase oxygen flow and spur more microbial activity.
- Screening. After 30 days, the Recompose team removes the soil and filters out any non-organics, such as surgical implants — a titanium hip, for instance — which are recycled. Bone gets reduced mechanically and recombined with the soil.
- Curing. In the third phase, the soil continues to dry out, microbial activities continue to finish, and temperatures continue to fall. After a couple weeks, the soil is ready to give back to family members for use in a garden. Some or all of it can also be donated to the Recompose Land Program.
Recompose, which employs 17 people, is regulated by three different agencies, including the Department of Licensing’s Funeral Board, the Washington State Board of Health, and the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, which regulates emissions and air odor.
“We’re regulated as a composting facility, which meant we had to follow pretty extensive design and permitting for our system,” Spade said. “I’m kind of proud of the regulations. They’re pretty great in Washington state. Some of the other states are making it too complicated for operators to work.”
She called composting “natural decomposition with a human touch” and said after four and a half years of operation, Recompose has learned a ton and dialed it all in to a pretty regular and consistent process.
“Death care is such emotion-heavy work,” she said. “We like to remind the team composting takes time. It’s a very natural process when we receive a person’s body here, there’s just no rush to get something done quickly — which is nice.”
