For 32 years, Kristoffer Hughes has worked with the dead—as a funeral director, an anatomist, and a Druid. He believes conventional Western funeral practices are fundamentally flawed. Embalming with formaldehyde, he argues, treats the body as a “problem to be solved,” leaching toxic chemicals into the ground. Cremation, meanwhile, releases an average of 280 kilograms of CO2 per body. And traditional burial in concrete-lined graves produces methane while preventing natural decomposition.
Hughes, who serves as Chief of the Anglesey Druid Order in Wales, found an alternative that aligns with his spiritual and scientific views: terramation, also known as natural organic reduction (NOR) or human composting. This process places the body in a stainless steel vessel with alfalfa, straw, and woodchips. Over roughly 30 days, microbes and air transform the remains into compost. The bones are then ground and recombined for another 30 days, yielding about 110 kilograms of soil that sequesters carbon rather than releasing it.
“This body is not ours to keep,” Hughes told European Pulse. “Every molecule is given to us on a quantum universal loan program. Upon our death, it is our responsibility to give those molecules back to the earth.”
An Epiphany in the Vessel
Hughes experienced terramation firsthand during filming for the Welsh-language series Marw gyda Kris (Death with Kris) at Return Home, a facility near Seattle. Sealed inside a dark chamber, he initially felt terror, then calm. “I felt this immense calm of being wrapped in this duvet of natural, organic materials,” he recalls. The smell, he says, was “of summer.” When the vessel opened, the scent was “petrichor.”
That moment dissolved his existential fear. “All of that energy that was in my body would, by this beautiful natural process, become fuel and food and nourishment,” he says. “They opened the box and let me out, and I stood up and wept.”
For the bereaved, terramation offers a different kind of closure. Unlike the “conveyor belt” of crematoriums, the 60-day process allows families to sit with their grief—and with a body that is “turning into life,” as Hughes puts it. At Return Home, loved ones can attend a “laying in ceremony,” covering the body in the vessel, which Hughes likens to “tucking them into bed.” They can also receive updates on each step, providing comfort that the deceased is treated with dignity.
Hughes recalls a woman who wrapped her arms around a vessel containing her mother. “She could feel her mum hugging her back,” he says. “She described this subtle vibration and immense heat. She said her mother was becoming Mother Earth.”
Terramation is legal in several US states, but in Europe it remains largely unregulated. Hughes and his business partner Chris Cooper-Hayes are working to bring the practice to the UK, where they have founded Cwmni TwmTwm. They face regulatory hurdles, as current UK law requires burial or cremation. However, growing environmental awareness and a shift in attitudes toward death may open the door.
“The closed-doors secrecy of most funerals stems from an imposed Victorian sense of dignity that allows the imagination to run amok,” Hughes argues. “Human composting is founded on transparency.”
As Europe confronts its own demographic shifts—the EU population is projected to decline by 12 percent by 2100, with sharpest falls in Eastern Europe—the way we handle death is also evolving. Terramation offers a sustainable alternative that returns the body to the cycle of life, a concept that resonates across spiritual and secular worldviews alike.
