Human Composting and Transforming Death Care with Katrina Spade of Recompose

Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Seattle-based Recompose, joins Kim Allchurch Flick for a discussion about her work creating “human composting,” a system that transforms bodies into soil. Spade describes how a personal realization during graduate school led her to design an urban alternative to conventional burial and cremation, combining engineering, biology, and navigation of funeral law. Recompose helped legalize human composting in Washington in 2019 and began public service in 2020, with some soil donated to conservation partners through a land program (e.g., Bells Mountain restoration). She explains the vessel process and that it yields about a cubic yard of soil per person. Spade discusses community support, transportation logistics, the inability to accept embalmed bodies, why Recompose focuses on humans rather than pets, goals for broader adoption, and encouraging families to talk openly about end-of-life plans.