[Americana:] The Departed Could Soon Become Compost in Colorado

If the governor signs the bill, Colorado would be the second state to legalize the composting of human remains.

Katrina Spade, the co-founder and chief executive of Recompose, monitoring the temperature of a mound of wood chips that contains a human body. Her company offers human composting services in Washington State. Credit...Mike Belleme for The New York Times

By Bryan Pietsch, The New York Times, April 29, 2021 Updated 1:28 p.m. ET [original article contains additional links.]

DENVER — Food scraps and biodegradable utensils are common fodder for compost, but in Colorado, human remains could soon be transformed into soil too.

The Colorado State Legislature passed a bill on Tuesday that would allow composting of human remains in lieu of traditional processes like burial and cremation.

State Representative Brianna Titone [jb - see below Wikipedia entry], a Democrat who sponsored the bill, said she had gone to funerals and, seeing burial or cremation as the two options, thought, “I don’t know if I want either one of these things.”

When she learned about human composting, she said, “It really excited me.”

If Gov. Jared Polis signs the bill into law, which legislators said was likely, Colorado would become the second state to legalize human composting. Washington State did so in 2019, and legislators in Oregon, California and New York have proposed human composting legislation. A representative for Mr. Polis did not respond to a request for comment regarding his position on the bill.

The legislation was introduced last year, but “it ended up dying during the Covid session, no pun intended,” said Representative Matt Soper, a Republican who was a co-sponsor of the bill.

In an attempt to lighten the mood while discussing the bill at the State Capitol on Monday, Ms. Titone and Mr. Soper told their colleagues they had “resurrected” the bill from last year’s legislative session. “Look alive!” Ms. Titone said, introducing the discussion. “We know you dug it before.”

The process of human composting takes about 30 days, Mr. Soper said. Under the new law, it would be illegal to sell the soil produced from human compost or to use it to grow food for human consumption.

Mr. Soper said he had spoken with the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, which said it would be legal to place the soil on public lands.

Recompose, a company that offers human composting services in Washington, places the body onto a bed of wood chips, alfalfa and straw inside a steel, 8-foot-long by 4-foot-tall cylinder, according to its website. Each body creates about one cubic yard of soil.

“Everything — including bones and teeth — transforms” during the process, its website says. The contents of the cylinder are also blended by Recompose staff members, “which helps to break up any remaining bone fragments and teeth.”

However, nonorganic material like prosthetics and artificial joints are fetched from the cylinder and removed.

Katrina Spade, Recompose’s co-founder and chief executive, said on Wednesday that the company was already looking at locations in the Denver area, where it hopes to build a 50-cylinder facility if the bill becomes law. Ms. Spade said people in Colorado had expressed interest in Recompose, adding that “there is an ethos of ecological love and respect in the Denver area and in Colorado broadly, everywhere from the mountains to the farming that happens around the state.”

She said that Recompose’s process saved about one metric ton of carbon dioxide for each body that is composted rather than cremated or buried traditionally. Mr. Soper, who represents a rural part of Colorado, said some of his liberal constituents were interested in human composting for its environmental benefits.

Among his more conservative constituents from the agricultural community, Mr. Soper said, there are “farmers or ranchers who really like the idea of being connected to the land that they were born and raised on.” 

The bill received bipartisan support in the Colorado Senate, but 18 votes against it in the House, all from Republicans. Mr. Soper said they had raised concerns that composting was not a “dignified” way to dispose of remains, some citing the Catholic Church’s opposition to the practice.

But Mr. Soper said that for him, the matter was less about explicitly supporting human composting and more about offering the choice.

“Why not?” he said. “Why should the government be prohibiting this type of option to be available to Coloradans?”

Mr. Soper said that Colorado was among the states with the fewest regulations for crematories and funeral homes, making it ideal for new human composting businesses.

Recompose has patents pending on its cylinders, but not on the human composting process, Ms. Spade said, adding that she hopes that human composting becomes “the default choice for death care.”

Bryan Pietsch is a general assignment reporter. @bybryanpietsch 

JB: From the Recompose homepage 

Become soil when you die Death is profound, momentous, and beyond our understanding. With an approach that is as practical as it is meaningful, Recompose connects the end of life to the natural world.

Brianna Titone

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia;[jb see also]

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Brianna Titone
Titone in 2020
Member of the Colorado House of Representatives from the 27th district
Incumbent
Assumed office January 4, 2019
Preceded by	Lang Sias
Personal details
Born	New York, U.S.
Political party	Democratic
Residence	Arvada, Colorado, U.S.
Alma mater	State University of New York at New Paltz (BS) Stony Brook University (MS) University of Denver (MS)

Brianna Titone (/tɪˈtoʊn/^[1]) is an American politician and scientist, currently serving as a member of the Colorado House of Representatives from the 27th district.^[2] She serves in the 73nd Colorado General Assembly and is the first openly transgender state legislator elected in Colorado and the 4th elected in the United States.^[3]

Contents

• 1Early life and education
• 2Career
  • 2.1Politics
• 3References
• 4External links

Early life and education[edit]

Titone was born and raised in the Hudson Valley region of New York.^[4][5]

Titone attended the State University of New York at New Paltz from 1996 to 2002 where she earned bachelor's degrees in Geology and Physics.^[3][6][7][8] She later earned a master's degree in Geochemistry at Stony Brook University,^[7] and another master's degree in information and communications technology from the University of Denver.^[7] At Stony Brook, her master's thesis was on Rare-earth element and Thorium speciation of fossils and sediments of the Green River Formation. Some of her research was conducted at Brookhaven National Laboratory using the National Synchrotron Light Source X-26A and X-18B beamlines.

Career[edit]

Before entering politics, Titone worked as a mining consultant, geologist, and software developer.^[9][7][3] For seven years, beginning in high school, she was a volunteer firefighter.^[3][6]

Politics[edit]

In 2016, Titone joined the Jefferson County, Colorado Democratic LGBT caucus and was elected its Secretary/Treasurer,^[6][10] and later appointed a "captain at large".^[6]

She declared her run for Colorado House of Representatives HD27 in December 2017. She received 50.4% of the vote to win the election with 24,957 votes out of 49,475, a margin of 439.^[11] She serves on the Health and Insurance Committee, the Rural Affairs and Agriculture Committee, and the Joint Technology Committee.^[12] She was also appointed to the Energy Council.

During her campaign, she worked four days a week and went to school to complete her master's degree in August 2018.

In the 2nd regular session of the 72nd General Assembly, she worked to bring back and pass the bill banning the "Gay and Trans Panic Defense". The bill passed on a margin of 98-1-1.^[13]

She won re-election in the most competitive House race in Colorado earning 29,566 (48.7%) of 60,708 votes against her two opponents in the November 2020 election.^[14]