By Ella Piper Claffy
In his final months with prostate cancer, 56-year-old Max Bozeman proposed several possible plans for his remains. Originally, his ex-wife told me, the Altadena resident wanted a funeral pyre on a lake, similar to Viking tradition. He ultimately decided on Earth Funeral, a Washington-based company that touts its quick composting process for human remains.
Within a week of his death in October 2024, Bozeman’s body was wrapped in a biodegradable shroud, adorned with wildflowers and placed in a long white tube with locally sourced organic mulch and wood chips. The vessel monitored temperature and air flow to maximize natural decomposition. Three months later, all that remained was nutrient-rich compost.
“Soil transformation,” as Earth Funeral delicately describes it — a slight misnomer, because compost is a soil amendment, not soil itself — first entered the mortuary scene six years ago, but has never been legal in California, where clients must have their bodies shipped to one of the 14 states where it is allowed. All of that changes Jan. 1, when state legislation legalizing the practice takes effect.
In the largest state in the nation, where the populace is famously open to new trends, especially environmentally friendly ones, companies like Earth Funeral see a major opportunity for growth. According to Recompose, a Seattle-based human composting service, California already comes in second only to Washington as a customer base.
It’s a startling concept but one with a certain appeal. Relatively speaking, it’s low in ick factor. Leigh McDaniel, Bozeman’s ex-wife who helped him plan his post-death plans with Earth Funeral, appreciated how full the transformation from corpse to soil amendment was. “Cremated remains are still considered remains,” she said. In contrast, compost is an entirely different material, one that’s mixed into soil. It can foster new life in the very near future, to grow tomatoes, say, or to nurture an indoor spider plant. It’s a rebellion against traditional funeral practices and literally in our own backyards. It’s also far friendlier to the environment than traditional burial or cremation.
During the months before his death, Bozeman grew increasingly comfortable discussing his future as an organic soil supplement. A friend promised to use it in her garden, while his daughter Luna decided she would plant watermelon seeds.
“In a way, it was like a second life,” McDaniel said. As such, it lent itself to casual conversation and even to humor. A friend joked to Bozeman, while eating watermelon, “You sure taste good this year, Max.”
The idea of human composting was developed and first promoted 15 years ago by Katrina Spade, who was taken with the idea of transforming mortuary practices to be more meaningful and natural. She wrote her masters thesis in architecture about a plan for the slow composting of bodies in urban areas, to provide a natural approach to death in places with little available land. Her thesis called for “a multistory concrete stack in which bodies would be piled to slowly decompose over the course of 18 months,” according to an article in Haverford College Magazine.
But when a friend told Spade about the rapid composting of livestock in the agriculture industry, she envisioned a quicker procedure than her concrete stacks, and one that would not take nearly as much space. Working with a team of experts and a grant from a nonprofit for social innovators, Spade successfully composted the first human body in 2018.
In 2019, the team persuaded the state of Washington to legalize human composting, and Spade opened the doors – and composting vessels – of Recompose the next year. The number of customers has grown each year. In 2025, it was about 3,000, Spade said.
“Composting only sounds radical when you first hear about it,” she said. “It pretty quickly becomes a natural choice.”
Indeed, death is an ever-evolving industry. Fifty years ago, only 5% of Americans were cremated; now, it’s about 63%. Most of the rest have traditional burials. But both methods have an impact on the environment. According to the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Los Angeles, conventional caskets buried in the U.S. every year contain 90,000 tons of steel, along with 2,700 tons of copper and bronze. Cremation emits an estimated 535 pounds of carbon dioxide per burning, according to Memorials.com.
At a price of about $7,000, composting is a little more expensive than cremation, but considerably less costly than traditional burial.
Those who choose composting see it as a parting gift to the Earth as well as enrichment of the literal earth beneath our feet.
Because many families use only a fraction of the cubic yard of compost produced by their loved one for personal memorials, Earth Funeral partners with land conservation groups on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, donating compost for reforestation projects.
California legalized human composting in 2022 but built in a five-year delay to develop regulations governing the industry. Composting mortuaries in California will be obligated to test the compost for potential contaminants as well as pH and nutrient levels.
During those five years, Tom Harries got busy founding Earth Funeral. He already worked in mortuary services, moving from funeral arrangements to an online cremation-arrangements company he founded in 2017. As he built that company, he noticed people who were making their posthumous plans kept asking, “How can I become a tree?”
“I realized there must be an opportunity there,” Harries wrote in an email. “And then Washington State passed legislation to legalize soil transformation in 2019.”
Harries said people “resonate with a gentle, natural process,” and “generally prefer soil to cremated remains – it’s a material they have interacted with their entire life, and feel comfortable around.”
There are arguably more natural options. In green burials, for instance, people are buried in a biodegradable shroud without embalming, casket or a concrete liner, allowing bodies to return to the earth naturally. But these are allowed only in permitted cemeteries with restrictions designed to protect groundwater. Compost can be used in people’s yards or scattered anywhere you could legally toss some dirt. It requires no dedicated space.
After Max Bozeman’s death, the family picked up the small barrels of compost in Las Vegas and stored them at his ex-wife’s Altadena house in anticipation of a ceremony with loved ones. But then the fire of January 2025 ripped through the neighborhood, burning the barrels and their contents along with the house. Initially, it felt to the family as though Bozeman’s chance at a second life had been destroyed as well. The only new life that would spring from his death was whatever could be achieved with a single canister of surviving compost.
In the end, McDaniel and the couple’s children scattered that bit of compost under an orange tree in the yard of the Altadena house they rented after the fire.
“It felt nice,” McDaniel said. “Like he still got to be with us.”
Ella Piper Claffy, a student at Yale University, has been a summer intern at L.A. Reported.
Interesting and potentially very useful, thank you for this well written article!