A company called Earth Funeral recently opened an approximately 36,000-square-foot human composting facility in Elkridge, Maryland, just outside the nation's capital, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported. The site holds 56 composting vessels and marks a significant expansion of an industry that barely existed a few years ago.
Earth Funeral announced the opening in a May 5 Facebook post. CEO Tom Harries told Axios he plans to double the facility's capacity and continue the company's nationwide expansion. The service takes around 45 days, costs on average less than $6,000, and leaves roughly 300 pounds of soil that families may keep or donate.
Human composting is now legal in 14 states, according to Earth Funeral's own state tracker. But the practice is drawing sharp pushback from religious conservatives and Republican lawmakers who say it reduces the human body to raw material, a line they argue a decent society should never cross.
Earth Funeral's website describes the practice as "soil transformation", what it calls "a sustainable alternative to cremation, traditional burial and aquamation." The body is placed "in a vessel with a mix of organic materials to provide the right balance of nitrogen and carbon," allowing it to break down naturally over roughly six weeks.
The company frames the service as a green alternative. Harries told Axios it is "purely about consumer choice."
"Soil transformation is one option, an environmental alternative to burial and cremation, not a mandate. We welcome questions and concerns from anyone looking for new, greener death care options."
That framing, consumer choice, environmental benefit, no mandate, mirrors the language progressive advocates have used to normalize a range of practices that traditional communities find deeply troubling. The question is not whether someone has the legal right to choose composting in one of those 14 states. The question is what it says about a culture that increasingly treats the human body as a resource to be recycled.
Not every state is going along. Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt vetoed HB3660, a bill aimed at legalizing human composting within the state, News 9 reported on May 13. Republican State Rep. Jim Shaw spearheaded opposition to the measure.
Shaw did not mince words. He emailed the Daily Caller News Foundation to say that "this site and the overall practice of turning dead bodies into human compost should be shocking and surprising to everyone."
Shaw also raised the military angle. An unnamed retired Air Force colonel reportedly told Axios that he discovered Earth Funeral while planning his estate and intends to lobby Arlington National Cemetery to permit composted remains. Shaw called that prospect unacceptable.
"[I] can't think of anything worse to dishonor the former or fallen military service members who served and possibly gave their lives for our country."
The idea that composted remains could one day be interred at Arlington, the nation's most hallowed military burial ground, is the kind of proposal that sounds benign to its advocates and offensive to millions of Americans who view that ground as sacred. The clash illustrates a broader cultural pattern: institutions built around shared norms of reverence and dignity face incremental pressure to accommodate practices that hollow out their meaning.
That pattern has played out in other arenas. Catholic nuns recently sued New York over a gender identity mandate that they say forces religious institutions to abandon core teachings, another case where the state's definition of progress collides with deeply held convictions about human dignity.
Shaw went further than practical objections. He quoted media figure Glenn Beck's coverage of the recently vetoed Oklahoma bill to make a philosophical case:
"If we start blurring the lines between dignity and utility, you do it first in death, then eventually you start doing it in life. Every regime that has treated human beings as raw material whether it was for labor, or experimentation or disposal, began that same quiet shift into darkness. A person becomes secondary, the system becomes primary."
That is a sharp argument, and it deserves a hearing that goes beyond the usual dismissal as religious squeamishness. The composting industry positions itself as forward-thinking and environmentally responsible. But Shaw's point is that how a society treats its dead reflects what it believes about the living.
Shaw put it plainly in his own words:
"Ultimately, the way we treat our dead says a lot about what we believe as a society. We need to be very concerned about viewing people as, and turning them into, products."
He added: "Most people intrinsically know that human beings are not waste, we are not raw material to be repurposed in death or in life. We were created by God."
For Shaw and millions of Americans who share his convictions, this is not a zoning dispute or a consumer-preference question. It is a question about whether a civilization retains the moral vocabulary to distinguish between a person and a product. That vocabulary has been under sustained pressure from institutions that increasingly treat traditional moral categories as obstacles to efficiency and progress.
The same tension, between progressive institutional mandates and longstanding moral norms, has surfaced in fights over California's secret gender transition policies, where the Supreme Court recently intervened to protect parental rights against a state bureaucracy that had decided it knew better.
Earth Funeral is not slowing down. Harries told Axios he intends to double the Elkridge facility's capacity and continue expanding nationally. The company's state tracker lists 14 states where the practice is already legal, and advocates are pushing legislation in others.
Oklahoma's veto shows that resistance is real and politically viable. Stitt blocked the bill even after it passed through the legislature, a reminder that governors willing to use the veto pen can still hold the line on cultural questions that legislatures sometimes let slide.
But the industry's growth model depends on normalization. Every new state that legalizes the practice, every new facility that opens near a major city, and every sympathetic media profile that frames composting as just another green lifestyle choice makes the next expansion easier. The Elkridge facility's proximity to Washington, D.C., the center of federal power and national symbolism, is not incidental. It puts the practice within reach of a population that trends younger, more secular, and more receptive to environmental branding.
The retired Air Force colonel's reported plan to lobby Arlington National Cemetery is a case study in how normalization works. What begins as a personal preference becomes a campaign for institutional accommodation. If Arlington were ever to permit composted remains, the symbolic effect would ripple far beyond one burial site. It would signal that the federal government itself has endorsed the premise that a human body is, at bottom, organic material to be processed.
Debates over how institutions should balance tradition and progressive demands have intensified across American public life. Even the Vatican and the White House have clashed over the boundaries of moral authority in an era of rapid policy shifts.
Earth Funeral's pricing, less than $6,000 on average, positions the service as a budget alternative to traditional burial, which can run significantly higher depending on the market. The 45-day timeline and the roughly 300 pounds of soil returned to families are marketed as practical advantages.
Those numbers will appeal to cost-conscious families. And that is precisely why the cultural guardrails matter. When economic incentives align with ideological momentum, practices that would have been unthinkable a generation ago can become mainstream in a remarkably short time. The question for state legislatures, governors, and voters is whether the savings justify the shift, or whether some things are worth more than efficiency.
Gov. Stitt's veto of HB3660 suggests that in Oklahoma, at least, the answer is clear. Whether other red states follow his lead or quietly allow the industry to expand will say a great deal about the conservative movement's willingness to fight cultural battles that don't fit neatly into an economic framework.
In a political landscape where religious liberty and traditional values face constant institutional pressure, from foreign policy debates to domestic courtroom fights, the composting question may seem small. It isn't. It sits at the intersection of faith, commerce, and the state's role in defining what counts as dignified treatment of the dead.
Earth Funeral calls it consumer choice. Jim Shaw calls it a quiet shift into darkness. Both sides have made their case. But only one side is asking the culture to cross a line that, once crossed, is very difficult to walk back.
A society that can no longer explain why a human body deserves more reverence than a compost heap has lost something no amount of green branding can replace.
