How did this become illegal in the first place? If a person wants to be buried somewhere and the land owner allows them to be buried there, what justification does the government have for being involved at all? Was there some incident or health concern that caused the Australian government to bother legislating about this?
I suspect the justification is keeping track of whole corpses so that in the event of an odd corpse turning up it can be quickly determined whether this a mysterious and possibly criminal death or just an off the usual track recorded death.
Private land burials on farms and family properties generally aren't an issue permission wise, local councils can be advised and would almost always agree unless there's some bizzarro small town politics thing going way back or something.
There's a few things at play here
- decomposing a body in a manner that's useful to the land much as bllod and bone fertilisers are,
- tracking identifiable body parts (like entire skulls, leg bones) so as to ease future investigations,
- biologically 'safe' disposal, ensuring rotting meat sacks aren't growing pathogens and leaking into water supplies.
There's overlap here with other 'common ground' legislation concerning pig, cattle, sheep, cracass and waste disposal, etc.
I saw a video about this a few months ago. It seems to make a lot more sense than burying a cement box in the ground or burning the body. It’s possible the the sources I’ve run into so far are bias, but I can’t really see any downsides.
What about non-compostable things like hip implants, dental work, silicone implants, micro-plastics and pacemakers with batteries? Are you going to cut all that out before burial?
This is from the Recompose FAQ, which is a company that offers this service.
> Bones are reduced to a fine powder by equipment after the soil is removed from the Recompose vessel. Staff also screen for non-organics such as implants, which are recycled whenever possible. The reduced bone is added back to the compost to help balance the compost nutrients and make minerals available to plants. It continues to break down and return to the environment over time. Recompose follows all compost-testing regulations put forth by the Washington State Department of Licensing and the Board of Health.
There is a good reason we bury dead people six feet down or cremate them.
Chucking dead bodies onto a compost heap in your garden seems so wrong. Its the flies that would put me off.
Remember rotten.com?
Save a small fortune on embalming and embalming fluid though.
Embalming fluid is pumped through the carotid artery and it takes about an hour to remove all the blood from an average-sized person and replace it with embalming fluid so its very costly.
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