Most of us have thought, at least once, about what we want done with our bodies when we die. Not in a morbid, spiral-at-2am way, necessarily, but in the quiet practical way that surfaces when you’re at a funeral that cost someone forty thousand dollars and took a week to plan, or when you realize the cemetery where your grandmother is buried is completely full. The conversation usually goes one of two places: burial or cremation. Those have been the options for so long that most people don’t know there is a third one, and it has nothing to do with a space pod or a Viking ship.
Human composting, formally called natural organic reduction, is exactly what it sounds like and also nothing like what you’re picturing. It doesn’t happen in a backyard bin. It’s a controlled, scientifically managed process that turns human remains into nutrient-rich soil – roughly a cubic yard of it – that can be used to nourish a memorial garden, plant a tree, or restore a stretch of forest. And as of May 2026, it just got a lot more accessible for anyone living east of the Mississippi.
The largest human composting facility in the United States opened its doors in Elkridge, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore, bringing a practice that had been quietly growing on the West Coast directly to tens of millions of people who previously would have had to ship a loved one across the country to access it. For families already weighing this option, proximity to a licensed facility is a genuinely meaningful practical consideration.
What Human Composting Actually Is
The process is more dignified, and more considered, than the name suggests. Remains are wrapped in a biodegradable shroud and placed in a vessel alongside organic mulch, wood chips, and wildflowers. The vessel accelerates natural decomposition, producing nutrient-rich soil in approximately 30 days. At the end of the process, any inorganic materials, such as metal implants or medical devices, are removed from the soil and recycled.
According to Axios, Earth Funeral CEO Tom Harries describes the vessel as simply accelerating what would happen naturally if someone died on a forest floor. The company likes to call it “soil transformation,” which is either a beautiful euphemism or a genuinely accurate description of the biology involved, depending on how you look at it.
Families can keep the resulting soil, roughly 300 pounds of it, donate it to conservation projects, or use it to plant memorial trees and gardens. If the family wishes to have a traditional funeral service, that can happen before the body goes into the vessel, and CBS Baltimore/WMAR reports that Earth Funeral can coordinate online obituaries and all the usual arrangements. Nothing about the process requires abandoning the rituals that matter to the family. The goodbye happens the same way it always has. What comes after is just different.
The New Maryland Facility
The Elkridge facility officially opened in May 2026, after Maryland legalized natural organic reduction through the Green Death Care Options Act, which took effect in October 2024. The facility spans 36,000 square feet and houses 56 composting vessels. Earth Funeral chose Maryland for its first East Coast location because of its central position, which allows the company to serve families from Maine to Georgia and into the Midwest.
CEO Tom Harries says the company wants to double capacity and plans to serve more than 2,000 families annually. Before this facility opened, the only options were Earth Funeral’s locations in Washington state and Nevada – which meant that for East Coast families, choosing this for a loved one involved either flying the body across the country or driving it, logistics that most grieving families are not in any position to manage. As Harries put it, “Families who’ve wished to choose this have had to fly loved ones to the West Coast. That incurs costs, complexity, and we believe if you resonate with this option, you should be able to do it locally.”
At $5,000 to $6,000, human composting is priced in a range that makes it genuinely competitive with what most families already pay for end-of-life arrangements – considerably less than a traditional burial, which can cost upwards of $10,000.
One Family’s Story
Stephen Spiese of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is someone whose wife already chose human composting. He transported her body to Washington to undergo the process and used the resulting soil to plant something in her memory. She was, he said, “very nature-oriented,” and when she found Earth Funeral, she told him that was the way she wanted to go. Spiese attended the opening of the Maryland facility in May 2026, partly to tour the space and partly, it seems, to understand more fully what his wife had chosen and to picture what he hopes is coming for him as well.
It is the kind of story that stops you mid-scroll. A man drove to a composting facility to be closer to his late wife’s choice and walked away saying he planned to do the same. There is grief in it, and there is also something that looks a lot like peace.
Why People Are Choosing It Over Burial and Cremation
The honest answer is: both burial and cremation come with environmental costs that many people find hard to ignore once they know about them. As Larkspur Conservation notes, a single cremation can release an estimated 532 pounds of CO2 into the air, and in 2023, more than 60 percent of Americans – roughly 2.2 million people – chose cremation as their final disposition. The cumulative impact of that is not small. Conventional burials often involve embalming chemicals, hardwood caskets, metal materials, and concrete burial vaults, all of which require significant manufacturing, transportation, and land use – and much of it never breaks down.
Cremation overtook burial as the more common choice in the United States largely because it’s cheaper and takes up no land. But the math on its emissions is not flattering at scale. Human composting sidesteps the fossil fuel combustion entirely and produces something that actively gives back to the earth rather than simply disposing of remains.
With an anticipated 330 million deaths in the United States over the next 80 years, Earth Funeral CEO Harries has said plainly that “it’s just not feasible to keep putting people in the ground.” That is a blunt way to frame it, but the population math is real.
The Legal Picture
Washington state was the first to legalize the process in 2019, with the law taking effect in May 2020. The movement has built considerable momentum since then. As of 2026, according to the Order of the Good Death, human composting has been legalized in 14 states: Washington, Oregon, Vermont, Maine, Georgia, Colorado, Nevada, California, Arizona, Maryland, Delaware, Minnesota, New York, and New Jersey.
Illinois has a bill moving through the Senate in late spring 2026, and several other states have introduced or reintroduced legislation in recent sessions. In states where the process is not yet legal, it may still be available to residents, since families can often arrange for transportation to a licensed facility in a neighboring state where it is permitted. Bodies can cross state lines for this purpose without restriction, which means the option is practically available to far more people than the list of 14 states might suggest.
The opposition that has emerged tends to come from religious organizations. The Maryland Catholic Conference testified in 2024 that allowing human composting takes away the dignity of death, arguing that “a simple burial or cremation, for instance, maintains the dignity of the deceased.” That objection is worth knowing about, not because it should be dismissed, but because for many families, the dignity question points in exactly the opposite direction.
Green Burial, More Broadly
Human composting is the most visible part of a larger shift in how Americans think about death. End-of-life planning conversations are expanding well beyond the traditional choices. Green burial, which involves interment in a biodegradable shroud or simple untreated wooden casket with no embalming chemicals, has been gaining traction for years, and it is now available at a growing number of dedicated natural burial grounds across the country.
The public appears broadly receptive to these alternatives. The 2024 Consumer Awareness and Preferences Report from the National Funeral Directors Association found that 68 percent of polled Americans said they would be interested in exploring green funeral options because of potential environmental benefits, cost savings, or other reasons. That is a majority of the country. What it is not, yet, is a majority of what actually happens at the time of death, largely because awareness still lags behind interest. Roughly the same proportion of people who say they’d consider human composting had never heard of it before the question was asked.
If you’ve been thinking about what end-of-life options actually look like in practice, this piece on watching a parent pass covers some of the things families wish they’d known earlier.
What You Might Actually Do With This
Death planning is one of those things most of us delay indefinitely, not because we’re naive about the fact that it’s coming but because sitting down to make the decisions feels like crossing a line. It’s not. Writing down what you want for your own body, and maybe having that conversation with the people who will be the ones making calls at 11pm in a hospital corridor, is one of the more loving things you can put on your to-do list.
Human composting won’t be the right answer for everyone. Religious conviction, family tradition, and the preferences of the people left behind all carry weight, and none of those things are small considerations. But for the person who has spent years reducing her plastic use, composting her kitchen scraps, and feeling obscurely guilty about the carbon footprint of her dishwasher, knowing that this option exists and is now accessible within a reasonable drive can feel like a genuine relief. Not a solution to anything. Just an alignment, finally, between how she tried to live and what she gets to ask for when it’s over.
You don’t have to decide anything right now. But you might want to know that the choice is on the table.
Disclaimer: This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and is for information only. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions about your medical condition and/or current medication. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice or treatment because of something you have read here.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.