#lynne carpenter-boggs

[sciencenewsforstudents]

SEATTLE, Wash. — Human bodies make great worm food. That’s the conclusion of an early test with six dead bodies. They were allowed to break down among wood chips and other organic matter.

This technique is known as composting. And it appears to offer a greener way to handle dead bodies. A researcher described her team’s new findings February 16 at the annual meeting, here, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS.

Disposing of human bodies can be a real environmental problem. Embalming of bodies that will be buried in caskets uses large amounts of a toxic fluid. Cremation releases lots of carbon dioxide. But letting Mother Nature break down the bodies creates new, rich soil. Jennifer DeBruyn calls it “a fabulous option.” She is an environmental microbiologist who wasn’t involved in the study. She works at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

Last year, Washington state made it legal to compost human bodies. It is the first U.S. state to do so. A Seattle-based company called Recompose expects to start accepting bodies for composting soon.

Lynne Carpenter-Boggs is a research adviser to Recompose. This soil scientist works at Washington State University in Pullman. At a AAAS news briefing, she described a pilot composting experiment. Her team put six bodies into vessels with a bunch of plant material. The vessels were rotated often to help boost decomposition. About four to seven weeks later, microbes in the starting material had broken down all the soft tissues on those bodies. Only parts of skeletons were left.

Each body yielded 1.5 to 2 cubic yards of soil. Commercial processes would likely use more thorough methods to help break down even the bones, says Carpenter-Boggs.

Her group then analyzed the compost soil. It checked for contaminants such as heavy metals, which can be toxic. In fact, Carpenter-Boggs reported, the soil met safety standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

DeBruyn notes that farmers have long composted animal carcasses into rich soil. So why not do the same thing with people? “To me, as an ecologist and someone who has worked in composting,” she says, “it just makes perfect sense, honestly.”

Another plus is that busy microbes in a compost heap put out a lot of heat. That heat kills off germs and other pathogens. “Automatic sterilization” is what DeBruyn calls it. She remembers composting cattle once. “The pile got so hot that our temperature probes were reading off the charts,” she recalls. “And the wood chips were actually scorched.”  

One thing not killed by this high heat: prions. These are misfolded proteins that can cause disease. So composting would not be an option for people who had been sick with a prion illness, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

It’s unclear how many people will choose human composting for their family’s remains. Lawmakers in other states are considering the method, Carpenter-Boggs said.

[angryteapot]

Book Two

Book One // Book Two // Book Three // Book Four // #tea reads Masterlist

From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

~ Caitlin Doughty

Synopsis: Doughty, a mortician, embarks on a global expedition to discover how other cultures care for the dead. She investigates the world’s funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity. 

It might sound morbid, but I can tell you that it is extraordinarily fascinating, and it has really made me question the “rituals” of the American funeral industry. 

A/N: For those of you who missed my intro post, Here’s the gist of this thing: I’m trying to read more books this year, so I’ve taken to documenting them and writing out some of my favorite quotes from whatever I’m reading! Once I finish a book, I’ll make a post with a summary of the books and the quotes I like best!

If you’re interested in new reads or just quotes, and would like to be tagged, send me an ask or dm! If you have any reading recommendations, send them my way!

If you wanna blacklist these posts, I’ll be tagging them #tea reads

I’m always up for a discussion on whatever I post, or life in general, so come talk to me! Have questions, theories, complaints, deep thoughts? Come talk to me! x ~ Tea <3

*Quotes are below the cut!

[QUOTES] Unless stated otherwise, quotes are taken from Doughty. “Unknown” is from a person that was not named. 

“Adults who are racked with death anxiety are not odd birds who have contracted some exotic disease, but men and women whose family and culture have failed to knit the proper protective clothing for them to withstand the icy chill of mortality.” ~ Irvin Yalom

“If it’s not resonating, forget it. it was the resonance that fed me.” ~ Stephanie

“I moved to Crestone to find joy. I thought it was the clouds and the open sky that healed me, but I think it really was Laura.” ~ Unknown

“Death, you think you have defeated us, but we sing the song of burning wood.” ~ Unknown

“It must be as if it were not.” ~  Noëlie Vialles

“I was asked by society to hide my grief... They didn’t want to confront such horrors. I was the face of those horrors. I was the boogeyman.” ~ Sarah Chavez

“She just wanted to engage with death, to be allowed to speak its name.” 

“This is where people treated me with the most kindness... In the place that was, for me, a place of death.” ~ Sarah Chavez

“What dignity translates to, more often than not, is silence, a forced poise, a rigid formality.”

“Down, down she goes, traveling more than a mile, until at last the beast meets soft bottom.”

“It is a solemn, magnificent moment, which has a sacred, majestic quality... one is overcome with wonder, admiration; when the form has vanished... sadness takes over.” ~ Lodovico Brunetti

“Whitman marveled at the ability of the Earth to reabsorb the corrupt, the vile, the diseased, and produce new, pristine life.” 

“I dug my own grave and slept in it last night.” ~ Lynne Carpenter-Boggs

“There is freedom in decomposition,  a body rendered messy, chaotic, and wild.”

“Seeing the truth like this, is always elegant... It gives you what you deserve as a human being. It gives you dignity.” ~ Jordi Nadal

“That is what I want in death: to disappear. If I’m lucky, I will disappear, swallowed by the ground...” 

“There was magic to each of these places. There was grief, unimaginable grief. But int hat grief there was no shame. These were places to meet despair face to face and say, “I see you waiting there. And I feel you, strongly. But you do not demean me.””

And that concludes Book Two, my lovelies! If you managed to read through even a part of this and found a quote you liked, my heart will be happy.

Thanks for stopping by my blog! x

~ Tea <3

[yasbxxgie]

Human compost funerals 'better for environment'

A pilot study on deceased volunteers showed that soft tissue broke down safely and completely within 30 days.

The firm, Recompose, claims that its process saves more than a tonne of carbon, compared to cremation or traditional burial.

It says that it will offer the world's first human composting service in Washington state from next February.

Speaking exclusively to BBC News, Recompose's chief executive and founder, Katrina Spade, said that concerns about climate change had been a big factor in so many people expressing interest in the service.

"So far 15,000 people have signed up to our newsletter. And the legislation to allow this in the state received bi-partisan support enabling it to pass the first time it was tabled," she said.

"The project has moved forward so quickly because of the urgency of climate change and the awareness we have to put it right."

Ms Spade spoke to me as results of the scientific study into the composting process, which Recompose calls natural organic reduction, was being presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle.

"There is a loving practicability to it," she said, in one of the few interviews she has given since announcing details of the project a year ago .

She told me that she came up with the idea 13 years ago when she began to ponder her own mortality - at the ripe old age of 30!

"When I die, this planet, which has protected and supported me my whole life, shouldn't I give back what I have left?

"It is just logical and also beautiful."

Ms Spade draws a distinction between decomposing and recomposing. The former is what happens when a body is above ground. Recomposing involves integrating it with the soil.

She claims that natural organic reduction of a body prevents 1.4 tonnes of carbon being released into the atmosphere, compared with cremation. And she believes there is a similar saving compared to traditional burial when transportation and the construction of the casket is taken into account.

"For a lot of folks it resonates with the way they try to lead their lives. They want to pick a death care plan that resonates with the way they live."

The process involves laying the body in a closed vessel with woodchips, alfalfa and straw grass. The body is slowly rotated to allow microbes to break it down.

Thirty days later the remains are available to relatives to scatter on plants or a tree.

Although the process is straightforward, it has taken four years of scientific research to perfect the technique. Ms Spade asked soil scientist Prof Lynne Carpenter Boggs to undertake the work.

Composting livestock is a well-established practice in Washington state. Prof Carpenter Boggs's task was to adapt it for human subjects and ensure that the remains were environmentally safe.

She carried out pilot studies with six volunteers who had given their enthusiastic consent to the research prior to their deaths. She told me that the work took an emotional toll on her and her team.

"We all kept checking in on each other. My physiology felt different, I wasn't sleeping well for a few nights, I wasn't hungry - it was a distress response."

Prof Carpenter-Boggs found that the recomposing body reached temperatures of 55C (131F) for a period of time.

"We are certain that there has been a destruction of the vast majority of [disease-causing organisms] and pharmaceuticals because of the high temperatures that we reached."

Recompose will begin business later this year. Anyone can participate but the process is legal only in Washington state. Legislation to allow natural organic reduction is currently being considered in Colorado. Ms Spade believes that it will be a matter of time before it is more widely available - in the US and elsewhere.

"We hope other states will pick up the idea once we get going in Washington. We have had lots of excitement from the UK and other parts of the world and we hope to open branches overseas when we can."

[liliannorman]

Greener than burial? Turning human bodies into worm food

SEATTLE, Wash. — Human bodies make great worm food. That’s the conclusion of an early test with six dead bodies. They were allowed to break down among wood chips and other organic matter.

This technique is known as composting. And it appears to offer a greener way to handle dead bodies. A researcher described her team’s new findings February 16 at the annual meeting, here, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS.

Disposing of human bodies can be a real environmental problem. Embalming of bodies that will be buried in caskets uses large amounts of a toxic fluid. Cremation releases lots of carbon dioxide. But letting Mother Nature break down the bodies creates new, rich soil. Jennifer DeBruyn calls it “a fabulous option.” She is an environmental microbiologist who wasn’t involved in the study. She works at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. 

Last year, Washington state made it legal to compost human bodies. It is the first U.S. state to do so. A Seattle-based company called Recompose expects to start accepting bodies for composting soon. 

Lynne Carpenter-Boggs is a research adviser to Recompose. This soil scientist works at Washington State University in Pullman. At a AAAS news briefing, she described a pilot composting experiment. Her team put six bodies into vessels with a bunch of plant material. The vessels were rotated often to help boost decomposition. About four to seven weeks later, microbes in the starting material had broken down all the soft tissues on those bodies. Only parts of skeletons were left.

Each body yielded 1.5 to 2 cubic yards of soil. Commercial processes would likely use more thorough methods to help break down even the bones, says Carpenter-Boggs.

Her group then analyzed the compost soil. It checked for contaminants such as heavy metals, which can be toxic. In fact, Carpenter-Boggs reported, the soil met safety standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

DeBruyn notes that farmers have long composted animal carcasses into rich soil. So why not do the same thing with people? “To me, as an ecologist and someone who has worked in composting,” she says, “it just makes perfect sense, honestly.” 

Another plus is that busy microbes in a compost heap put out a lot of heat. That heat kills off germs and other pathogens. “Automatic sterilization” is what DeBruyn calls it. She remembers composting cattle once. “The pile got so hot that our temperature probes were reading off the charts,” she recalls. “And the wood chips were actually scorched.”  

One thing not killed by this high heat: prions. These are misfolded proteins that can cause disease. So composting would not be an option for people who had been sick with a prion illness, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. 

It’s unclear how many people will choose human composting for their family’s remains. Lawmakers in other states are considering the method, Carpenter-Boggs said.

Greener than burial? Turning human bodies into worm food published first on https://triviaqaweb.tumblr.com/

[technibba]

Human composting could be the future of deathcare | Society

Human composting could be the future of deathcare | Society

It is viewed as a fitting end for a banana skin or a handful of spent coffee grounds. But now people are being urged to consider human composting and other environmentally friendly “deathcare” options.

Speaking before a talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Seattle on Sunday, Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, a professor of soil science and sustainable agriculture…

[tattooed-alchemist]

Neither embalm-and-bury nor cremation (all that fossil fuel!) is particularly environmentally friendly. “Cremation is not the green option we all sort of think of it as,” Spade says, estimating that 95 percent of Seattle residents choose it as a preference. And embalming? The practice was popularized when nineteenth century soldiers were preserved to be slowly shipped back home after death. The greenest option right now is natural burial, says Spade, “how we did things before the Civil War”—aka placing the unembalmed corpse a few feet underground. But these days a simple earthen grave takes up more real estate than is practical.

That prompted her to give new life to the old technique of composting. With the help of Washington State University soil scientist Dr. Lynne Carpenter-Boggs and a six-person human trial last summer, Spade developed a version that totally breaks down a body in about a month, leaving only rich, fluffy soil. (Family members can take the whole thing—more than a cubic yard of dirt—or a symbolic small box of it, and scatter it like cremated remains.) The kicker: Recompose estimates it saves a metric ton of carbon emissions compared to either cremation or burial.

State Senate Bill 5001 proposes to sanction recomposition—“contained, accelerated conversion of human remains to soil”—alongside cremation. It would also legalize alkaline hydrolysis, a process similar to cremation but done with fluids, already legal in a handful of other states.