Human Composting: A New Way to Deal with Death? (Kristoffer Hughes)

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1:46Gabriel Gatehouse:Before we begin, a quick word about next week's show. For decades, the word prepper has conjured up images of wild-eyed survivalists stocking up on supplies, getting ready for the apocalypse, possibly wielding a gun and wearing a tinfoil hat. But now the British government is urging us all to stock up on supplies of food and water in preparation for extreme weather. And the National Audit Office is telling us that our supply chains are vulnerable to disease and cyber attacks. So are the preppers right? Should we all be digging bunkers in our backyards? we're going to be speaking to a prepper on the program so please send us your questions which will feature in our bonus q a podcast after the main show you can leave us a whatsapp voice note on plus 44 330 123 9480 or you can email us the address is radical at bbc.co.uk anyway let's get on with this week's show

2:56Gabriel Gatehouse:Hello and welcome to Radical, conversations about the underlying forces reshaping our world and the radical ideas that could define the future. I'm Gabriel Gatehouse and this week I'm joined by someone who wants to overhaul the way we deal with death by doing something very different to our bodies once we've died. When the time comes, most of us, at least in this country, face a choice basically between burial and cremation. It's been that way for centuries. But things are starting to change. Other methods are not just being talked about, they're actually taking place in some parts of the world.

3:34Gabriel Gatehouse:One idea is called terramation. It's from the Latin terra, meaning earth. And in this process, the body is turned into soil. Soil that you might be able to put in a plant pot or scatter in your garden. It's human composting, basically. It's not legal in the UK, not yet, but my guest wants to change that. Christopher Hughes was a mortuary technician for more than 30 years. He worked for coroners around the UK. He's also travelled the world, looking at different cultures and their approaches to death. And now he's become a passionate advocate of terramation, and he wants to set up the UK's first human composting service.

4:17Gabriel Gatehouse:Is it a radical idea? Well, he thinks so. He thinks it could transform not just how we mourn and grieve and celebrate our loved ones, but also our attitude to death itself. As you might expect, there are question marks about safety, sensitivity and scale. As always on this podcast, we approach the subject with an open mind and a critical lens. Obviously, this is a conversation about death, and it does include some quite graphic detail sometimes about what happens to the human body after you've died. So just to be aware of that and a little warning before we start. But I hope you enjoy my conversation with Christopher Hughes.

5:02Gabriel Gatehouse:Christopher Hughes, welcome to Radical. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. It's great to have you in the studio. Could we start by just outlining your radical idea in like a sentence? My radical idea is that deceased human bodies should be turned into life-giving compost. Human composting? Yes, human composting. Okay. Like the little bin you have in your kitchen? Slightly larger, but the same technology. Okay. Well, we'll get into it. We'll get into it. But first of all, I want to know how you got into it. Like what led you here? Tell me about yourself. Oh, my word. It's quite a story, really.

5:40So for the last 32 years, I worked for His Majesty's Coroner, various autopsy and bereavement centres throughout the United Kingdom. And so I've always had an association and a direct relationship with the dead and the bereaved. And I genuinely didn't think that there was anything left to surprise me in that industry, having become so intimately familiar with it. And in 2021, I retired from the coroner service and I'd already dabbled in television. But as soon as I left, S4C, the Welsh national language television broadcaster, were on to me straight away saying, we'd like to do a documentary about how we deal with death.

6:28And they didn't want an off-the-shelf presenter. They wanted somebody who had at least some understanding of the industry and of the anthropology of it. So I agreed. We travelled the world filming a documentary called Maru, which is just the welsh word for death and it was a remarkable life-changing journey which i didn't expect it to be you know you get you you're just doing a gig right it's just a job you don't expect it to have such a profound impact on your life and whilst mexico was incredible indonesia and the sulawasi people were absolutely mind-blowing in the the manner by which they deal with their dead.

7:14But the biggest surprise came from the United States of America, which I didn't expect at all. I'd worked in America. I worked for the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's Office. So we went to film the ridiculous side of death, right? The$25 ,000 caskets, the$5 million mausoleums being embalmed to look like Madonna, you know, the ridiculous, almost this attempt at immortalising the body and immortalising the persona. So after Los Angeles, we flew up to Seattle, and I purposefully did very little research myself before we went to any of these places. The production company were, they were determined that my reactions should be as authentic as possible.

8:06So I did very little reading up on all of the things that we got to see in film. So we went to Seattle and we went to visit a company called Return Home Natural Organic Reduction, which I'd heard of. I'd heard of this attempt to bring natural organic reduction, which is the scientific name for human composting. Its funereal term coined in America is terramation to become earth so we went to this facility and it utterly blew my mind i had never seen anything like it it it it caused me to re-evaluate the vocabulary that we use surrounding death the culture surrounding death the the way in which we are expected to respond to death all of those things were brought into question by the very process of human composting and it was so remarkable that myself and the production crew were immensely affected by it so much so that we are all all of us vested in bringing this to the united kingdom okay that's really interesting

9:24Gabriel Gatehouse:because you'd been working with the dead for three decades or more. I had you down in my notes as a death service professional. Yes. Is that what it's called? Yeah. I sort of imagine someone in a black cloak and a scythe. That's my boss. Okay, yes. That's all of our boss, isn't it? Yeah. Because it happens to us all in the end. But just what did you do for these mortuaries, for the coroner's office, for the L.A. medical examiner's office? What did you actually do? Were you dealing with dead bodies? Yeah. So when I left school, I went and trained for four years in anatomical pathology. So after that, I became an anatomical pathology technologist or an autopsy technologist.

10:10So my work was primarily clinical. so the performance of autopsies together with a pathologist a medical doctor and the facilitation of mortuary services as well so caring for the deceased and then we would rotate into bereavement services just to give our backs a little bit of a break from autopsy which is heavy hard hot work you know and so so primarily my work was clinical with an occasional sojourn into bereavement services where you got to sit behind a desk and actually be with the living, with the bereaved. So it was every aspect of coronal and mortuary services.

10:50Gabriel Gatehouse:But you were seeing the emotional side of death that we, on a daily basis, that we sort of prefer not to think about. And it's kind of hidden away, isn't it? Very much so. So in a sense, from a social and anthropological perspective, people like myself are referred to as visceral insulators. Wow, what's that? And the visceral insulator does exactly as it says on the tin. It insulates others from the visceral, from the horrific, from the distressing, lest they become undone by that distress. So that there's always been cast of people throughout society, throughout history, who can become habituated to distressing circumstances and become habituated enough to learn how to deal with that never to become used to it i think that would create a coldness but rather to become habituated by processes of dealing with it so that other people don't have to deal with it and so that particular role i always found very fulfilling very satisfying knowing that if somebody came to our facility there was a story to tell and they were no longer capable of telling that story and it was up to us as a team to discern what that story was had there been any injustice had there been any you know anything out of the ordinary that needs to come to light and also perhaps just to provide closure for somebody who's just dropped quite dead in the street in the uk broadly speaking after you die you've basically got two options right you can either be buried or you can be cremated yes um could you just tell us a little bit about the history of how that came to be the case in the uk um and where we're at with that at this moment in time so as you rightly say we have we have two options conventional burial or perhaps alternative burials which would be considered natural burials green funerals green funerals and there's a lot of those now throughout the british isles and they're they're amazing things And I'm so pleased and happy that that is available to so many people, again, depending on which area you live.

13:00Gabriel Gatehouse:So it's essentially that you'd get buried not in a churchyard or a cemetery, but in woodland or... Yeah, woodlands, meadows. And this is available. This is not what we're talking about here. This is not terramation. No, no, that is available. And we would always, I've always advocated for that, because you are bringing green spaces into places that might not otherwise have had any. But that's fairly new as well. And it's risen quite exponentially over the last 25 years. But prior to that, and still to the majority of people, it's a conventional burial, which is becoming quite problematic. Because of?

13:39Because of space. So, and in recent months, there's been movements from various local authorities, from various local governments, that they need to consider renting grave spaces for 75 years or 100 years so that they can recycle them, particularly in metropolitan areas like London.

13:58Gabriel Gatehouse:So that would mean if you get buried in a cemetery and then 75 years later, they dig you up. They reuse that grave. Right. Yeah. But the thing that really surprised me, one of the things that surprised me while researching for this interview, was that 75 % of us or more in this country get cremated. I had no idea it was that high. It's so high. It's incredibly high. And when you think as well, the fascinating thing about cremation, and I have a particular, there's a quiddity that runs through my life to the story of another person who is responsible for the legalization of cremation in the United Kingdom.

14:37And it only goes back to around 1888, where there was a Welsh Druid who denounced the Christian faith and identified himself as a Druid. And people had no idea how to deal with Dr. William Price, but he did so much good in the world. And when are we talking? He died in 1888. So around 1880, he had a young child with his wife, Gwen Lian. and just to antagonise the Methodist community of South Wales, he called the child Jesse Grist, which is the Welsh word for Jesus Christ. And unfortunately, little Jesus Christ died when he was 18 months old. As a Druid, in his opinion, bodies shouldn't go into the ground, they're polluting the ground.

15:25He was aware that ancient Celtic peoples would have probably practised excarnation, which is the placing of bodies on a platform to be pecked by the elements. Excarnation. That's called excarnation.

15:36Gabriel Gatehouse:I've heard about sky burials as well, so a similar thing happens in Tibet. I'd say, yeah. So its funereal term is excarnation. And so he was aware of those things. So he decided that the honourable, the moral, the ecologically sound thing to do was to cremate the body of his son. And again, antagonistically so, he did it just as the chapels were letting out on a Sunday evening on a hill in South Wales. So people came out and were like, oh my word, what the hell is Bill doing on a hill with a bonfire, knowing that his son had just died, this 18-month child? So he was arrested, and trigger warning, the child had to be removed from the pyre, and he was promptly sent to court.

16:25He represented himself and he won. He won the case to legally cremate his son's body. And standing in the back of that courtroom at the time were the nation members of the British Cremation Society who were also wanting something to become a catalyst. Because of Dr William Price and the effort to the British Cremation Society, it was legalised with the 1905 Cremation Act of Great Britain.

16:53Gabriel Gatehouse:So cremation in this country has been legal for, what, around 150 years? It's like 120 years. 120 years. Yeah. That's incredible. And there was enormous kickback. Right. Enormous kickback. So before that, everyone was buried. Everybody was buried. In a churchyard, presumably. Predominantly in a churchyard. Or in another religious cemetery. Yeah. And you mentioned William Price, who identifies as a druid. You identify as a druid, right? I'm a druid as well, yes. How has that, just briefly, and then we'll get on to the specifics and details of Terramation and your proposed radical idea, but how has Druidry informed this place that you've got to?

17:34Gabriel Gatehouse:It's been a huge... Maybe I should start with, what is a Druid? That's a good place to start. That's a good place. So a druid is, so the term itself just means those who know the oak or those who have the wisdom of the oak or perhaps more romantically or poetically, those who are oak wise. That's where the word comes from. It has, you know, a fairly tenuous link back 2000 years ago to the druid priest caste of ancient Britain. But the revival of Druidry happened in the 1700s, where it was perceived that there could be a spirituality that was not one of the top five, that could pull on the animistic, as in everything is alive, and polytheistic traditions of ancient Britain in a way that perceived the world through a Celtic worldview.

18:21Now, we want to say the word Celtic is quite provocative because currently there's seven Celtic nations, each one with their own unique culture. But there is a strand that connects us all. So Druidri, as a practice, was revived in the 1700s by various people in England and in Wales. And in 2010, it was recognised by the United Kingdom government that it's an official religion. So it's class. We have the same protections of religiosity as any other religion. And to some, it's a spirituality. And I would say that mine, to me, it's a spirituality that has a religiosity to it.

19:01Gabriel Gatehouse:And how long have you been a Druid? 35 years. Wow. Can you just take me through, how does it work? What physically happens? I die, then what? Right. OK, so you die, you're taken to a teramation or natural organic reduction facility. And what am I thinking? Am I thinking like a cabin in the woods? Am I thinking like an industrial kind of recycling plant? That. Right. Yes. So it depends, right? So it depends on currently, because it's legal in so many parts of the United States, each state will have their own legislation. there'll be regulation and then there'll be secondary legislation which will say you have to be located in this kind of premises.

19:45In Washington state where there are three terramation facilities the the regulatory body in Washington state they only had cremation to go by as a point of reference and in Washington you can only have a crematorium on an industrial estate It can't be anywhere other than an industrial estate. So they went with the same thinking, the terramation facilities, industrial estates.

20:10Gabriel Gatehouse:So I die, my body gets taken to an industrial estate where there's a terramation facility, then what do they do? So they take you into this facility, which is very nice, very swanky, very beautiful, very peaceful, decorated beautifully, nothing black, everything's green. And the deceased is taken into the facility and they're placed inside a vessel, a teramation vessel. And those vessels will vary in design, but essentially what's happening inside is exactly the same, regardless of the design that a company might utilise. In the place where we went, and I've been subsequent times since, it's an eight foot long box by four foot deep with a lid.

20:53It just looks like an ordinary big plastic looking box. and it's half filled with alfalfa for nitrogen-rich organics.

21:04Gabriel Gatehouse:Which is a sort of crop of grass? Yeah, over here we'd know it as lucerne over here and very similar to red clover and similar. It holds nitrogen really well. And then you have sawdust for absorption and straw for insulation. And then half the box is filled with that material, quite a lot of that material. The deceased patient is laid on top of it. They make like a little bed and a pillow of material. And then families are invited to tuck that individual in, to literally tuck them in, to cover them with the material. They can have their favourite sandwiches in there or anything that is organic and will reduce can go in with the deceased.

21:46The lid is closed. There are only two holes in the box, one for air in and one for air out. And then there's a thermometer or a probe in there as well to measure humidity and temperature. And the box is placed on a rack and the air filtration system is attached to it. And that runs partially on some power, depending, some might have solar, but it's also generating its own power as decomposition occurs within the box.

22:15Gabriel Gatehouse:A bit like the compost heap you have in the garden. Yeah, it gets hot, right? Steams in the autumn. So just like your pile at home, it will generate an immense amount of heat. And there comes a point where you have to turn it. You'll have to go in there with a fork and turn your compost. So a similar thing happens in a teramation facility. So within 72 hours, the temperature inside that box has increased to around about 160 degrees Fahrenheit. It's incredibly hot inside that box. So you can feel the heat on the side of the vessel. But also what I found remarkable was you can feel a dynamicism.

22:53You can feel almost like a vibration occurring because there's so much dynamic, thermodynamic and organic chemical interactions happening inside this box. So when the temperature starts to dip, which might be five days later, six days, depending on the size of the individual, then that gives an indication to the facility that now it needs to be turned. So the box, again, depending on the facility and the technology that they use, the vessel would then be rotated. So it's just like turning your compost at home. It'll rotate, it'll agitate what's inside and the temperature will spike again. Drop, turn, spike, drop, turn, spike.

23:33And then when it no longer spikes, stage one or phase one is over, approximately 30 days. That's all it takes. And what are you left with? So what you're left with, and that's what blew my mind. It totally, I mean, I've seen, I don't know, thousands of people in various stages of decomposition in so many different ambient and non-ambient environments. When they opened the box, it's tipped out onto a sifter, kind of like a conveyor belt. But there was no body in there. There wasn't a body in this box. What was there? There was just brown soil that was slightly damp to the touch, but not wet. And I'd seen what went into that box.

24:26It's beige-coloured straw and cream-coloured sawdust and the green of alfalfa. And a body. And a body. And I'm thinking, where's the body? so the the compost comes out it goes onto a sifter so the smaller particles fall through onto a bottom layer and everything else goes up on the short conveyor belt and they all go to the same destination which is another box much smaller than the first one and then all of a sudden there was a a slight bang and i look towards the box and what looked like an excavated archaeological bone appeared completely disarticulated but it looked old it looked as if it had come out of the ground of a 4 000 year old bronze age grave or something like like a skeleton no just a bone

25:21Gabriel Gatehouse:it was just a bone it was just one bone the femur so so i think i identified it as a tibia right that's in your leg isn't it yes yeah anatomy's not yes it's at the bottom of your part of your So more bones would come out. But what surprised me was that somehow in my mind, I'd envisioned that there would be some kind of wet material and a skeleton. But I thought there's going to be soft tissue. There was no soft tissue. After 30 days? Nothing. Not a single piece of soft tissue was left in that box. So then what we find is that the misconception when it comes to funereal practices is that the next stage people find somewhat untasteful until we remind them of the reality of the funeral industry.

26:08So those bones are picked out and they're placed in a cremulator. What's that? So a cremulator is what they have in a crematorium. So after fire and cremation has occurred, what is left behind in the incinerator is the skeleton. Just like terremation, it's been disarticulated because, you know, it's a process, right? There's movement in a cremation chamber. So you have a skeleton that's left behind, disarticulated. The skeleton is removed from the furnace and the bones are placed in a cremulator. The bones go in. This is in a crematorium and they're reduced to a fine gravel. And that's what people receive back as ashes of the deceased.

26:51Exactly the same thing happens in a terremation facility. Then they're reintroduced back into the slightly damp organic material. so the reduced bones and the and the sifted compost goes back in everything goes back into a big box and that box is then closed and goes back on a shelf for another 30 days 60 days in total and at the end of that 60 days after the final process of curing resting and drying i i couldn't i couldn't believe my eyes i just couldn't i couldn't fathom what i was seeing i knew what had gone into that box and and what came out the other end the most gorgeous divine smelling pure compost you smelt it it's it's what did it smell of you open you open the lid and it hits you like a ton of bricks it's the smell of petrichor what's that it's the smell of rain on soil after you know after it's rained you walk out and it's been dry like it's been this summer and there's that delicious smell of the earth reacting to the rain.

28:00Gabriel Gatehouse:I think for me there's like a sort of cognitive dissonance here because I'm thinking, you know, a dead body, a deceased loved one, grief but also like bodily fluids. And then you're describing the smell of rain on parched soil. Petrichor. I was incredibly sceptical when I saw what went into that box. I was like, there's no way, you know, what's coming out of this box can't be what I think it's going to be. So then after 60 days, what are you presented with? A bag of compost? No, you're presented with one cubic yard of compost. 250 pounds. It's a lot. That's a lot. There's nine bags and the bags are big of pure compost.