New Jersey legalizes human composting
as eco-friendly burial alternative
New York Post,
by
Caitlin McCormack
Original Article
Posted By: JoElla Bee,
9/16/2025 10:16:19 PM
Living up to its name even in death. The Garden State approved a bill that legalizes human composting, an alternative to traditional burials in which a corpse is transformed into nutrient-rich soil that loved ones can use to feed their favorite houseplant or scatter like ashes. Human composting, more formally known as natural organic reduction, has skyrocketed in popularity after the COVID-19 pandemic left more than a million Americans dead.New Jersey is the 14th state to have legalized the practice over the last six years.
Post Reply
Reminder: “WE ARE A SALON AND NOT A SALOON”
Your thoughts, comments, and ideas are always welcome here. But we ask you to please be mindful and respectful. Threatening or crude language doesn't persuade anybody and makes the conversation less enjoyable for fellow L.Dotters.
Reply 1 - Posted by:
Catherine 9/16/2025 10:18:53 PM (No. 2004881)
Oh my god. Even science fiction never went this far. People actually spread Aunt Gladys under their rose bushes? Nope. No can do.
35 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
JoElla Bee 9/16/2025 10:24:13 PM (No. 2004883)
FTA: With Earth Funeral, the deceased’s loved ones are in control even from across the country and can decide how much soil they’d like returned to them, ranging from a smidgeon to scatter similarly to cremated ashes or enough to comfortably house a potted plant.
My question is what do the composters do with the remaining compost from the bodies that isn’t sent to the families? I’m skeptical that the compost companies would miss an opportunity to make $$$, if they could. Makes one want to reconsider buying organically grown vegetables!
28 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
JoElla Bee 9/16/2025 10:26:28 PM (No. 2004884)
Sorry about the poorly worded sentence.
7 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
LC Chihuahua 9/16/2025 10:31:47 PM (No. 2004886)
Who knew human composting would bring about the zombie apocalypse. it could be the plotline for a cheap horror movie. Just have to laugh at the insanity.
16 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
konocti95 9/16/2025 11:04:43 PM (No. 2004889)
Now we know what really happened to Jimmy Hoffa.
22 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
konocti95 9/16/2025 11:08:20 PM (No. 2004890)
Waiter! There's a finger in my Soylent Green.
41 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
Kate318 9/16/2025 11:09:43 PM (No. 2004891)
Covid did not leave over a million Americans dead, Caitlin, and this is gruesome. What’s next, Soylent Green?
17 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
Timber Queen 9/16/2025 11:14:43 PM (No. 2004893)
This is so wrong in so many ways. It reduces personhood to the same level as rotting vegetables...compost. Even ancient cultures knew enough to bury their dead with the meaningful objects of their lives. Primitive people knew human beings were different from the animals and plants; their deaths were meaningful. Much of the information we have regarding our human past comes from archeologists finding graves and studying the grave goods and burial practices.
Even though cremation is acceptable to the Catholic Church, with the stipulation the "urned" ashes be buried or placed in a mausoleum, it's not my choice. I know many folks like to keep their loved one's ashes at home, but what of the long-term disposition of the ashes after the primary greaver also passes away? I know a woman who brings out "her husband" and places him on the baby-grand piano for every family celebration and holiday. I find that creepy. (She wants her corpse to be buried, and her husband's urn will be in her casket. Guess who ran that family?!)
27 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
Flyball Dogs 9/16/2025 11:21:59 PM (No. 2004897)
This makes sense.
We’re devolving in every other way. How we take care of our dead is just another nail in our civilization.
Although, gardening with Aunt Mary seems preferable to having her as a nugget around my neck.
12 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
NotaBene 9/17/2025 12:21:10 AM (No. 2004905)
The Doctors that brought US COVID forgot about the plague, anthrax, and smallpox. Pleas use that compost in your own vegetable gardens.
11 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
wilarrbie 9/17/2025 12:42:15 AM (No. 2004907)
In my state one can have a family burial mini cemetery if own enough acres - like 10 or so. Often enough some farm properties have one that goes with the sale, some going way back to late1800s! I'm planning on cremation, but yeah, I'd go natural earth burial on my back 15. Never saw the sense of the sealed casket in a bunker, entombed forever long after anyone would care. Plant somethings for the hummingbirds. Yeah.
13 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
JimBob 9/17/2025 12:59:33 AM (No. 2004910)
#5! #6! Good ones!
#10, agree. What of any dangerous germs or 'pathogens' that might survive and re-infect other people?
Plague, anyone?
I have to admit that, on reading the title, my first thought was that I could nominate a few prominent 'Rats for immediate composting...... but given their nature, I doubt that anything would grow wherever their 'organic matter' was finally deposited.
11 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
thefield 9/17/2025 1:20:12 AM (No. 2004917)
My wife would be more than happy to spread me.
9 people like this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
kono 9/17/2025 1:23:10 AM (No. 2004918)
Punctuating the lifelong denigration of the human body. One final indignity. Lord, have mercy.
23 people like this.
Reply 15 - Posted by:
DVC 9/17/2025 2:31:25 AM (No. 2004926)
Disgusting and bizarre.
18 people like this.
Reply 16 - Posted by:
NotaBene 9/17/2025 3:27:39 AM (No. 2004939)
The Medical Doctors of today are completely uneducated in Hygiene. DEI probably did it to them.
Many pathogenic bacteria generate spores that are almost indestructible. The Germans centuries ago learned to bury dead cows to prevent entire fields of becoming infectious for decades. The brain takes the longest time to decompose. In the diseased state it can contain extremely stable proteins called prions that transmit spongiform encephalopathy or mad cow disease. In New Guinea, brain cannibalism spread Kuru prions that turned people mad after 15-40 years of incubation. Ebola does not have spores but it is transmitted by body remains, especially fluids. If any rats get into the human compost piles, and rats are everywhere, their fleas will pick up Yersinia pestis and transmit the bubonic plague, which we now have in California thanks to Illegal Aliens.
Long ago the Roman Legions knew that latrines must be dug downstream of army encampments. For 200,000,000 years of existence humans kept the dead separated from the living. Cannibalism was not a successful lifestyle.
Sorry for tha second post, but the deplorable status of Environmental Medicine and the AMA makes makes my blood boil.
27 people like this.
Reply 17 - Posted by:
HisHandmaiden 9/17/2025 3:33:02 AM (No. 2004940)
The Good News, New Jersey, is that Scripture reminds Believers in the book of Romans, that we will be walking with Jesus in Heaven for eternity, riding beautiful white horses as Beloved Charlie Kirk no doubt is right now…
Dear LDotters, if you don’t understand all this, may I lovingly encourage you to find a nearby Bible Church, visit it next Lord’s Day and take the time to sit down and talk with the Pastor or Elders.
Jesus reminds us in the Gospel of John 14:6, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life… No one comes to the Father but by Me.’
TBIYTC
14 people like this.
Reply 18 - Posted by:
seamusm 9/17/2025 4:22:18 AM (No. 2004942)
Been true in New Orleans for centuries. In that environment the bodies of the dead rot so fast that graves are commonly reused. Given space needs in our cities, concrete burial vaults and 'perpetual care' should probably be abolished to emulate New Orleans and now Jersey.
6 people like this.
Reply 19 - Posted by:
Rather Read 9/17/2025 4:22:51 AM (No. 2004943)
My mother wanted to be buried, my father wanted to be cremated. We got a crypt in our local cematery where their remains are together. I don't know about human composting - it sounds like a way for a company to make money.
14 people like this.
Reply 20 - Posted by:
Amoeba 9/17/2025 5:16:08 AM (No. 2004949)
nowhere in the Bible does it require burial, or cremation, burial at sea, or any other way. It doesnt matter if you are a Believer in Christ. God knows where your body is located and will bring you up to meet Christ in the air. Soon after, you will have a new body similar to Adam's and Christ's.
14 people like this.
Reply 21 - Posted by:
DCGIRL 9/17/2025 5:33:58 AM (No. 2004953)
Totally gross.
13 people like this.
Reply 22 - Posted by:
bpl40 9/17/2025 6:32:10 AM (No. 2004960)
Pickling and cannibalism is next?? Disgusting.
10 people like this.
Reply 23 - Posted by:
Strike3 9/17/2025 6:49:22 AM (No. 2004968)
The funeral industry now makes over $10,000 per body. I would say the money is pretty good already. Instead, feed the fish or see Elon for a one-way trip into space.
8 people like this.
Reply 24 - Posted by:
Red Jeep 9/17/2025 7:02:06 AM (No. 2004973)
What happens to the skeleton?
9 people like this.
Reply 25 - Posted by:
skacmar 9/17/2025 7:33:28 AM (No. 2004988)
How is human composting any different than burying the body in the back yard? People were composed for a long time before someone decided that everyone needed a fancy casket, cement vault, and expensive cemetery plot.
15 people like this.
Reply 26 - Posted by:
Dodge Boy 9/17/2025 9:14:56 AM (No. 2005020)
As for Kanada, the great white north never ceases to amaze me. They now have walk-in clinics where you can be euthanized no questions asked.
As for human composting, I'll let the dims give it a try.
As for me, I prefer how Spock did it. Having one's body sent to the plant Vulcan where it regenerates and is born again into the world is the ticket. Life is too good to miss out on a second go at it.
8 people like this.
Reply 27 - Posted by:
paral04 9/17/2025 9:46:30 AM (No. 2005034)
LOL I can hear it now. Polite dinner conversations about how much better their garden tomatoes taste after they used Aunt Millie's compost..
9 people like this.
Reply 28 - Posted by:
JimBob 9/17/2025 10:03:08 AM (No. 2005047)
This just popped into my head.....
Gives literal meaning to the phrase "Pushing Up Daisies."
12 people like this.
Reply 29 - Posted by:
FormerDem 9/17/2025 10:04:09 AM (No. 2005049)
The Scriptural reason that burying the dead is one of the corporal works of mercy is Tobit 1:17-18. Now to be sure that is not in the Protestant canon; on the other hand the Protestant canon takes up the canon of the Sadducees, who left out everything to do with eternal life because they didn't believe in it. the Pharisees did believe in eternal life, and their canon is the one the early Church took up. (That's why Protestants don't find Purgatory in the Bible and Catholics are like it is obviously there.) Everybody knows to bury the dead. And there is Antigone, obviously not Scriptural but part of the heritage of the family of Man. A poster raised the question of is this going into our food, and yeah, it looks like another way the left is poisoning earth and air and sky and water.
5 people like this.
Reply 30 - Posted by:
stablemoney 9/17/2025 10:13:30 AM (No. 2005053)
I think it is a good option for Democrats.
6 people like this.
Reply 31 - Posted by:
Zigrid 9/17/2025 10:46:17 AM (No. 2005074)
Poster #2 has it right...some enterprising young capitalist will figure out how to make money for themselves by selling "soil" to compost farms for organically grown vegetables... I shall not shop for organically grown vegetables....those days are over....even though Illinois is not one of the states who do this...or so WE've been told....
5 people like this.
Reply 32 - Posted by:
FLCracker 9/17/2025 10:52:51 AM (No. 2005078)
Ashes, dust, earth; how you get there is only gross and disturbing depending on what you are familiar with.
Try Zoroastrian sky burial, and all the steps the ancient Egyptians did to produce a mummy. Read what churchyard cemeteries were like after of burying a few hundred years-worth of parishioners there. Our modern embalming, which developed in response to those cemeteries, are not much better and but certainly more "clinical." And once they figured out that lead from lead coffins and arsenic in bodies with embalmed with it, would leach out into surrounding ground and water sources, they were safer, too.
#1, You're wrong. Check out Becky Chambers' "Record of a Spaceborn Few". Humans permanently living on enormous, closed-system spaceships, where NO resources could be lost. It gives the whole rationale, belief system and rituals to accommodate returning a dead body to part of the ship's eco-system while still treating it as the remains of an individual human life. (This is only a part of the book. BTW, the rest of the Galactic community sees them, and other humans, as akin to our idea of an 1800s Ozarks hillbilly. The intelligent "jellyfish" that comes to visit likes them, though.)
The Spaceborn would more likely put Aunt Gladys in the vegetable garden.
Me, personally, I want to go to the Body Farm and with my surviving bones put in an archaeological skeleton collection. If I couldn't be a forensic anthropologist, I can be the research subject of one.
5 people like this.
Reply 33 - Posted by:
FLCracker 9/17/2025 11:29:05 AM (No. 2005106)
Oh, and for you Western European descendants. Apparently, at least some Celtic groups also practiced sky burials.
4 people like this.
Reply 34 - Posted by:
Old Army Vet 9/17/2025 12:03:28 PM (No. 2005128)
Nest step, Soylent Green.
4 people like this.
Reply 35 - Posted by:
JHHolliday 9/17/2025 3:35:51 PM (No. 2005215)
There was a crematory owner here in North Georgia who couldn't pay his gas bill to run his cremation oven so he scattered the bodies around in the woods, pond on his property etc. He then sent the ashes back to the families, but they were burned briquettes from his barbecue grill.
I don't remember his prison sentence, but it was pretty lengthy.
5 people like this.
Reply 36 - Posted by:
Kafka2 9/17/2025 5:24:02 PM (No. 2005265)
This is nothing new. Organized Crime has been doing this like for ever! #Jimmy Hoffa
4 people like this.
Reply 37 - Posted by:
WWIIDaughter 9/17/2025 5:41:20 PM (No. 2005275)
God made us in His image. I wouldn't use an old Bible for bathroom purposes. And using a human body like chicken that's gone bad in the fridge is the ultimate rejection of humanity's value. It's nihilism, even worse than utilitarianism, and it's destroying our civilization.
3 people like this.
Reply 38 - Posted by:
Ned Scott 9/17/2025 8:39:47 PM (No. 2005366)
As a lifelong resident of New Jersey (incidentally, the unfailingly gracious 5 handicap’s “favorite” state only after the great state of Maine), I wonder if former NJ Governor Chris Christie will opt for this “human-composting” procedure when his time eventually comes?
And, if former Governor Christie does opt to be “composted,” will the undertaker have to find a container as big as a Sherman tank to accommodate the “slightly” obese Garden State Governor?
1 person likes this.
Reply 39 - Posted by:
danu 9/17/2025 10:00:30 PM (No. 2005396)
many moons ago, this famous research scientist took up residence in one of the big labs.
she found valuable viral specimens on ice for decades, and had a look. she got ill.
they were many many times stronger and more potent on every level than her own brews.
you want that in your compost pile, or climbing your fencing?
you'd never know; nor would your estate agent .
2 people like this.
Below, you will find ...
Most Recent Articles posted by "JoElla Bee"
and
Most Active Articles (last 48 hours)
Comments:
Human composting is already legal in Washington, Oregon, Vermont, California, New York, Nevada, Arizona, Delaware, Maryland, Minnesota, Maine, and Georgia, and now New Jersey.