The first time Laura Muckenhoupt felt a glimmer of hope after the death of her 22-year-old son Miles was the drive home from the Washington state facility that had turned his body into hundreds of pounds of soil.
"We're going to grow him," she remembered thinking. "We're going to grow him, and we're going to continue to be his parents and his sister and his friends."
Human composting turns bodies into soil by speeding up "what happens on the forest floor," according to Tom Harries, CEO of Earth Funeral, the human composting company the Muckenhoupt family worked with.
"What we're doing is accelerating a completely natural process," Harris told CNN. Human composting is emerging as an end-of-life alternative that is friendlier to the climate and the Earth — it is far less carbon-intensive than cremation and doesn't use chemicals involved to preserve bodies in traditional burials.
Tap the link in @cnn bio for more.
📸 : John Naccarato/Earth Funeral
Britain’s £195m expansion of green heat networks, now extended to Wales, marks a clear advance for sustainable construction and sustainable urban development. District heating is moving into mainstream procurement, with direct consequences for sustainable building design, low carbon design and energy-efficient buildings.
For developers pursuing net zero carbon buildings, heat strategy is now central to whole life carbon, whole life carbon assessment and life cycle cost decisions. Environmental sustainability in construction is becoming less about pledges and more about infrastructure delivery, planning certainty and measurable building lifecycle performance.
Warnings over missing Biodiversity Net Gain guidance for nationally significant infrastructure show that green infrastructure and environmental compliance now carry real programme risk. Biodiversity is a core design and land-use issue for sustainable design, eco-design for buildings and sustainable building practices, not a cosmetic addition.
A new process for recycling acrylic without loss of quality points to the kind of circular economy breakthrough the sector needs to cut embodied carbon, address embodied carbon in materials and lower the carbon footprint of construction. If scaled commercially, it could strengthen circular economy in construction, support low carbon construction materials, improve resource efficiency in construction and advance end-of-life reuse in construction. Green construction is being tested on what matters most: low carbon building systems, consent resilience and credible progress towards net zero whole life carbon.
Whole Life Carbon is a platform for the entire construction industry—both in the UK and internationally. We track the latest publications, debates, and events related to whole life guidance and sustainability. If you have any enquiries or opinions to share, please do
get in touch.
Let's chat!
WLC Assistant
Ask me about sustainability
Hi! I'm your Whole Life Carbon assistant. I can help you learn about sustainability, carbon assessment, and navigate our resources. How can I help you today?