Constable: How you, when you die, could become garden-ready soil in about a month

For the sake of the environment, my family has been composting food scraps for months. We throw orange peels, coffee grounds, broccoli stems and such in a metal container on our kitchen counter. We change the charcoal filter from time to time so it doesn't stink. When it gets full, we haul it to the backyard compost bin - a plastic container that we spin every few days as if it were a ball cage for bingo.

A month or so later, we open the composter door to reveal rich, dark soil.

Now, my survivors might be able to do the same thing with my body when I die.

Think of it as Soilent Green, which is what I would have named the company if I had come up with a way to compost humans. But environmentalist entrepreneur Katrina Spade calls her new endeavor Recompose, and she answers questions at recompose.life.

"We asked ourselves how we could use nature - which has totally perfected the life/death cycle - as a model for human death care. Why shouldn't our deaths give back to the earth and reconnect us with the natural cycles?" Spade emails. "At the same time, we're aiming to provide ritual, to help people have a more direct and conscious experience around this really important event. As hard as it can be, the end of one's life is a profound moment - for ourselves and for the friends and families we leave behind."

I'm sure there are many ways to craft a touching ritual for the procedure the company calls "natural organic reduction," but this is basically what happens:

Mourners place the body, wrapped in a simple shroud, into one of the reusable, hexagonal recomposition vessels built into a Recompose facility designed by Spade, who has a master's degree in architecture.

Then the body is covered with an organic material, such as wood chips, alfalfa or straw, and aerated. This creates a perfect environment for naturally occurring thermophilic (heat-loving) microbes and helpful bacteria. The system controls the mix of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and moisture, and it mixes the materials several times during the process.

Muscle, fat, skin, bones and even teeth recompose. Non-organics, such as my titanium hip as a result of an old basketball injury, can be salvaged and recycled. In a month, that old funeral saying about dust returning to dust comes true.

"The material we give back to families is much like the topsoil you'd buy at your local nursery," reads the news release. A typical body generates about a cubic yard of soil, which would fill about nine typical wheelbarrows. Recompose suggests donating any unwanted soil to public projects. Instead of rotting 6 feet underground in a box, you could be part of the dirt holding up an expressway exit ramp.

On Thursday, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (who has made environmentalism the cornerstone of his campaign as one of the Democratic candidates for president in 2020) signed a bill legalizing the process. The law will take effect May 1, 2020. The process uses an eighth of the energy of cremation, saving a metric ton of carbon dioxide per person. It requires no embalming fluid, caskets or vaults. Instead of taking up valuable land with burials, composting a human actually makes land.

Maybe the process will come to Illinois soon.

For some people, perhaps those of you reading this during breakfast, the idea of dipping your hands into what used to be Aunt Edna so you can plant some basil generates an "eww" feeling. But nature has been turning people into dirt for millenniums. Maybe it's time we got onboard with nature.

"The death-care revolution has begun," Spade says at the conclusion of her TED Talk on the subject. "It's an exciting time to be alive."