"Human composting — or, as it’s sometimes referred to, natural organic reduction — fulfills many people’s desire to nurture the earth after dying."

"It owes much of its present form to Katrina Spade, a Washington-based designer and entrepreneur who told me that her goal is to see 'composting overtake cremation as the default American deathcare in the next couple of decades.' In 2015, as an architecture student, Ms. Spade launched a nonprofit called the Urban Death Project, envisioning strolling past the brownstones of Brooklyn and coming upon a municipal human composting facility. Here, passersby would reflect on mortality and the cycle of life, feeling a sense of connection to the earth, past and future — the way urban cemeteries like Green-Wood were designed to make repose in death a harmonious part of city life..."

From "If You Want to Give Something Back to Nature, Give Your Body" by Caitlin Doughty (NYT).

But we're told the New York State Catholic Conference has said this process “is more appropriate for vegetable trimmings and eggshells than for human bodies.”  

What's the process? It's described in detail and with graphics (and it strikes me as unnecessarily above-ground and complicated). There's "a cylindrical vessel" (which the author likens to a Japanese capsule hotel!). The body, wrapped in a shroud, is put in there with wood chips, sawdust, and alfalfa, and "other meaningful organic materials" as people see fit. Flowers, presumably, but what else? Favorite foods? Dead pets? It's sealed up for 6 to 8 weeks and everything but the bones breaks down. The bones are ground up in a cremulator and mixed back into "the soil," which is left to dry out. Finally, you have something like one cubic yard of soil. I looked it up, and I think that might be one ton of soil. 

Now you somehow give this back to nature. Where?! How??!

Just do a green burial. It's the same idea of letting the body decompose, but you bury the shrouded body at the beginning and you never dig it up and never grind the bones. You never have the "Japanese capsule hotel" phase.

Yes, you are sacrificing the in-town building that induces passersby to "reflect on mortality and the cycle of life," but, come on, the city is already perfectly suited to making you think about dying often enough. It's sufficiently evocative of death already — the cars always seem ready to run you down, you descend into the subway and necessarily think of the lunatics who push people onto subway tracks, and so forth. I know, it doesn't quite stir up a romanticized feeling of "a sense of connection to the earth." But does the Japanese Capsule Hotel of Death?