Mabone's Funeral Home

Jay Inslee signs it into law on May 1, Washingtonians starting in May 2020 will be the first in the nation to have the choice to get their bodies “recomposed” after death. Katrina Spade, the method’s founder and key supporter, and her team at Recompose hope to open the first facility offering these services soon after. Spade says the company is currently looking at locations in SoDo.The law has been a long time coming. Attempts to legalize alternatives to burial or cremation, such as alkaline hydrolysis (basically cremation via hot, chemical-filled water instead of fire inside a pressurized vessel), have been proposed and shot down in Washington Legislature for the past two years. But this year the bill also included recomposition (or “natural organic reduction,” as phrased in the bill) — the term Spade uses to describe the process of turning human remains into soil.“I think lawmakers were familiar with the bringing of a new death care option to Washington because they'd heard about it for the past two years around alkaline hydrolysis,” she says. “With natural organic reduction, we spent a lot of time talking to legislators to really try to explain the process.”Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, has been the primary sponsor on each of the three subsequent alternative decomposition bills since the first attempt in 2017. He says the first bill legalizing alkaline hydrolysis failed after pushback from the Catholic Church and the then-Republican-controlled Senate. The Senate's Labor and Commerce Committee Chair at the time, Michael Baumgartner, chose not to bring it to a vote. This year, Democratic control of the Senate helped get the issue in front of legislators. Pedersen says that with proper education on the process, recomposition became less foreign.“I think when people hear ‘composting,’ their vision is that you’re going to dump a bunch of bodies out in a pile in the backyard and throw some food scraps on top of it, cover it up and let it rot,” he says. “But of course that’s not th...