Human composting explained: how NSW's terramation law works
New South Wales has voted to allow human composting. How terramation turns a body into soil, what it costs, where else it is legal and what critics say.
Why it matters
Families in New South Wales will get a third choice besides burial and cremation, in a city where burial space is scarce and expensive. The law also adds Australia to a short list of places that allow it.
A human body can become about a cubic yard of garden soil in roughly two months. New South Wales has now voted to allow it, the first Australian state to do so.
The NSW parliament passed the Public Health Amendment (Terramation) Bill 2026 on October 21, making human composting, which the law calls terramation, a third legal option alongside burial and cremation. No one can choose it yet. Rules and licensed facilities come first, and services are not expected before 2028.
Quick answer: Human composting places a body in a closed vessel with wood chips, straw or alfalfa, where microbes turn it into soil over several weeks. It is legal in 14 US states and runs as a pilot in one German state, and NSW is the first part of Australia to approve it.
The idea sounds stranger than it is. Bodies buried in the ground decompose too, over decades. Composting speeds that up in a sealed, monitored container, and the family gets the soil back. The appeal is partly practical, because Sydney is running out of cemetery space, and partly personal: some people want to end up as a tree rather than in a plot or an urn.
What New South Wales voted for on October 21
Alex Greenwich, the independent member for Sydney, introduced the bill in June as a private member’s bill, meaning it came from a backbench MP rather than the government. The Legislative Assembly, the lower house, passed it on October 15 and changed its name from “natural organic reduction” to “terramation”. The Legislative Council, the upper house, passed it on October 21 without amendment, steered there by Emma Hurst of the Animal Justice Party. Greenwich said it passed unanimously. It now awaits the governor’s assent, the formal final step.
- June 2026: Greenwich introduces the bill in the Legislative Assembly.
- 15 Oct 2026: The Assembly passes it, renamed the Terramation Bill.
- 21 Oct 2026: The Legislative Council passes it without amendment.
- 2028 or later: First services expected, once regulations are written and facilities are licensed.
Coverage of the start date has been muddled, with some reports saying 18 months and others two years. The bill’s own history explains why. The version Greenwich tabled in June would have let a licensed operator, called a “reduction controller”, compost a body from the day 18 months after assent, according to the explanatory note in the first print. The version that passed sets two years, according to Greenwich and to summaries of the final text published by EconoTimes and Evergrove, a company planning to offer the service in Australia.
The bill is short because it works by amending other laws. As introduced, it changed the Public Health Regulation 2022 to define compost, reduction facilities and reduction controllers; changed the Coroners Act 2009 so that composting a body without authority counts as unlawful disposal of remains; and changed the state’s standard planning instrument so local councils can list a “body reduction facility” as a permitted type of development. The passed version adds safeguards described in those summaries. A body cannot be composted against the person’s written wishes, each vessel holds one body unless the state health secretary approves otherwise, and the finished soil can go to the applicant, another person, a cemetery or land set aside next to one.
Inside the vessel: how a body becomes soil
Providers in the United States, where the practice has run since 2020, describe the same basic sequence.
- Lay in. The body is placed in a closed, reusable vessel on a bed of plant material such as wood chips, alfalfa and straw.
- Heat up. Air flows through and microbes, many already present in the body, break down soft tissue, heating the pile as they work.
- Screen. After about five to seven weeks at Recompose, the Seattle company that opened the first facility, staff remove anything that cannot break down, such as a metal hip replacement. Bones are crushed mechanically and mixed back in.
- Cure. The material rests for three to five weeks at Recompose, or about 30 days at Return Home, another Washington state provider.
- Return the soil. Families take it home, use it to plant a tree, or donate it to conservation land.
Washington’s rules define the process as the “contained, accelerated conversion of human remains to soil”. Each body produces about one cubic yard of soil, roughly three-quarters of a cubic meter, according to Recompose. Its founder, Katrina Spade, told ABC News in Australia that about half of its families take all of the soil home, while the rest keep a bag or two and donate the remainder.
The safety tests Washington writes into law
Washington, the first state to legalize the practice in 2019, sets out in regulation what the soil must pass before it leaves a facility. Each batch is called an “instance”. A facility must send its first 20 to an independent laboratory, then test at least a quarter of each month’s batches until 80 have met the limits. Every batch is checked for leftover bone, dental fillings and implants, which must be below 0.01 milligrams per kilogram.
| Test | Limit (dry weight) |
|---|---|
| Fecal coliform bacteria, or | under 1,000 per gram (most probable number) |
| Salmonella | under 3 per 4 grams (most probable number) |
| Arsenic | 20 ppm or less |
| Cadmium | 10 ppm or less |
| Lead | 150 ppm or less |
| Mercury | 8 ppm or less |
| Selenium | 18 ppm or less |
Source: Washington Administrative Code 246-500-055, as amended in 2024.
What the science does and does not show
The evidence base is thin, and much of it is tied to the industry. The founding study was a pilot at Washington State University in 2018, sponsored by Recompose. Soil scientist Lynne Carpenter-Boggs composted the bodies of six donors and found microbes reduced them to skeletons in four to seven weeks, with the resulting material meeting EPA limits for heavy metals. Every trial reached 55°C (131°F) for three days, the EPA benchmark for killing most pathogens in compost, according to Recompose’s summary of the study. She presented the results at a scientific meeting in 2020, Science News reported, and was at the time a research adviser to Recompose. Carpenter-Boggs said people with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal brain illness caused by heat-resistant prions, would not be allowed into the process.
Germany offers the largest independent look so far. Since February 2022, the Berlin company Meine Erde has run a pilot of “Reerdigung” (re-earthing) in Schleswig-Holstein, studied by the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Leipzig University. A first paper in the journal Rechtsmedizin in January 2024 examined two cases: after about 40 days no soft tissue remained, and most medicine residues had broken down. By November 2025 the institute had examined almost 50 cases and still judged the method safe for people and the environment, with temperatures inside the vessel above 70°C, Germany’s Protestant news agency epd reported.
The Netherlands reached the opposite conclusion. On October 2, 2025, its Health Council advised the government not to permit human composting yet. In a letter to parliament the following month, the interior minister said the council found too little scientific literature and no agreed description of the process, flagged a real risk of spreading tuberculosis from people who died with a latent infection, and said the method looked sustainable but lacked data to prove it. The Dutch government dropped composting from its planned update of the country’s burial law and kept alkaline hydrolysis, a water-based alternative to cremation.
The contrast is one of sequence. The Netherlands wants more studies before allowing the method; NSW has passed the law and left the safety detail to regulations still to be written.
What does human composting cost?
There is no price in Australia yet. Greenwich told ABC News in June that he expects it to be “cheaper than cremation”, and it needs no coffin and no burial plot.
| Option | Local price | In US dollars |
|---|---|---|
| Australian funeral with burial or cremation (Moneysmart, government guide) | A$8,000 to A$20,000 | $5,600 to $14,000 |
| Burial space in Sydney, upper end (Greenwich) | up to A$50,000 | up to $35,000 |
| Recompose, Washington state | $7,000 | $7,000 |
| Return Home, Washington state | $5,950 | $5,950 |
| Meine Erde, Germany, full package | from €4,250 | from $4,760 |
Source: ABC News; Recompose, Return Home and Meine Erde price pages, October 2026. A$1 = US$0.70 and €1 = US$1.12, European Central Bank reference rates, October 23, 2026.
The US prices are full-service packages. Recompose’s includes transport within Washington state and the Portland area, filing the death certificate and an online obituary. Transport from further away costs extra.
Fourteen US states and one German pilot
Washington’s law was signed in May 2019 and took effect in May 2020. Thirteen states have followed.
| State | Law passed |
|---|---|
| Washington | 2019 |
| Colorado, Oregon | 2021 |
| Vermont, California, New York | 2022 |
| Nevada | 2023 |
| Arizona, Delaware, Maryland, Maine, Minnesota | 2024 |
| Georgia, New Jersey | 2025 |
Source: Earth Funeral state law tracker, updated September 30, 2026; Wikipedia.
A law on the books does not mean a facility nearby. California’s law takes effect only in 2027, and no new state had been added in 2026 as of the tracker’s September update.
In Germany, the practice is allowed only in Schleswig-Holstein. It began in 2022 under official tolerance at a church cemetery in Mölln, and in early 2024 the state parliament in Kiel added a clause to its burial law allowing trials of new methods, epd reported. The pilot phase was due to end in mid-2026, with a final report to follow.
Objections from churches and MPs
In the US, opposition has come mainly from religious groups. In March 2023 the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ doctrine committee said human composting and alkaline hydrolysis do not meet the Catholic Church’s standards for respectful treatment of the body, judging them against a 2016 Vatican instruction on burial and cremation that asks for remains to be kept in a sacred place.
In NSW the bill met little resistance, but some MPs raised concerns. Liberal upper house member Susan Carter did not vote against it but warned that terramation should not simply become “a human compost bin”, and said human remains must still be treated with dignity and respect. Premier Chris Minns said in June that he “felt a bit weird about it”, ABC News reported.
Several MPs went the other way. Greens MP Amanda Cohn, Labor’s Cameron Murphy and Libertarian John Ruddick each said they would likely choose it, and Ruddick told parliament he plans to request it in his will.
The words matter to the industry. Aria Kapaniris, Evergrove’s founder, has said the term “human composting” is being phased out because it suggests waste, and the bill’s wording changed during debate.
The hurdle most coverage misses: finding a site
The hardest step may be local, not legal. A composting facility is a building that handles human remains, and someone has to agree to have it next door. Germany’s pilot shows the risk: Meine Erde had to leave its first site in Mölln in 2023 after local politicians declined to approve a building it needed, epd reported. It later added a chapel in Kiel.
The NSW bill as introduced anticipated this by creating “body reduction facility” as a category that councils can write into their local planning rules. Whether councils choose to use it will decide how soon most people in the state can actually choose terramation.
What happens next: After the governor signs the bill, the NSW government will consult on regulations covering facilities, equipment, inspections and registration. Greenwich has said he expects terramation to be available in about two years.
The number to watch is the testing regime. Washington requires 80 batches of clean lab results before a facility can test less often, and NSW has yet to say what its own threshold will be.
