On this special mid-week episode, we're sharing a remarkable installment of GeekWire’s new podcast, Positive Charge, which is all about finding slivers of hope in climate and sustainability.

In their latest show, reporter Lisa Stiffler and producer Laura Scott find that hope in an unexpected place: an innovative alternative to traditional burial and cremation. It might not be the topic you were planning to delve into today, but we think you'll find it enlightening and inspiring. You can follow and subscribe for more at geekwire.com/positivecharge.

John Cook and Todd Bishop will be back this weekend with the regular weekly show.

What if the greenest thing you ever do is die? This episode of Positive Charge digs into human composting — the process, also called natural organic reduction, that turns a body into clean soil instead of ash or embalmed remains. It's the end-of-life option Martha Stewart says she wants, and a Seattle entrepreneur is the reason it exists.

Katrina Spade set out to build a climate-friendly alternative to cremation and burial while still a graduate student in architecture, drawing on a practice farmers have long used to compost livestock. Turning that idea into a business meant clearing two enormous hurdles: engineering a process that safely breaks a body down into soil in a matter of weeks, and rewriting laws that made the practice illegal in all 50 states. We go inside Recompose, her Seattle facility, where bodies rest in stainless steel vessels and naturally occurring microbes generate all the heat that does the work.

Then the episode turns to the people signing up. Interest cuts across the political map, with as many customers coming from conservative Eastern Washington as from Seattle, and a surprising share of them are young. Tune in to hear why composting is catching on as death care, how the science actually works, and what it means to choose becoming soil.

Sources and references

Interviews:

Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose
Micah Truman, founder and CEO of Return Home
Elyssa Tappero, customer of Recompose and tsunami program manager for the Washington Emergency Management Division

Additional sources:

Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, chair of the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Washington State University
Inside Recompose, where the human composting startup is ready to grow its formula beyond Seattle (GeekWire)
50+ & Unfiltered with Shawn Killinger, Episode 124 with Martha Stewart
The environmental toll of cremating the dead (National Geographic)
The Potential of Our Decay: Cemeteries That Save the American Landscape (Smithsonian)

This episode was hosted by Lisa Stiffler and Laura Scott, and edited and produced by Laura Scott, with editorial assistance from Todd Bishop. Sponsored by Amazon Sustainability.

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