<figure class="wp-block-audio"></figure>

Brie Smith is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Return Home, a company that specializes in natural organic reduction (NOR), also known as human composting or terramation, as an alternative to burial or cremation. Return Home was founded in 2021 in Washington, USA after the passing of a law allowing NOR, with the goal of providing a more natural and gentle way to care for human remains.

In this episode we talk about:

• Brie’s background, which includes being a licensed funeral director, embalmer, and crematory operator, but she found traditional cremation processes unsatisfying.





• A little bit about the history of embalming and that it, and many other things, may not be mandatory.





• Embalming, viewing restrictions, and lack of options at traditional funeral homes can interfere with the grieving process, and that the grieving process can interfere with decision-making capabilities of the family.





• Return Home’s services which emphasizes personalized, transparent care and allows families involvement like viewing and time with the body before terramation.





• The process of NOR and how NOR returns nitrogen-rich remains to the earth, addressing declining soil health from lack of organic matter returning to the environment.





• The difference between green burial, alkaline hydrolysis (water cremation), and NOR are more sustainable alternatives to traditional burial and cremation.





• Why Return Home can accept decedents from Canada.





• Return Home aims to educate the public about death, dying, and more sustainable options through their website, blog, newsletter and social media outreach.

Return Home’s…

• Website: https://returnhome.com/





• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ReturnHomenor





• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/returnhomenor/





• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@returnhomenor?





• Twitter / X: https://twitter.com/ReturnHomeWA

---

Notes from the start:

Tell me about you! Where are you and why do you listen to Scattered? Fill out the survey and be entered into a draw to receive the ebook Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist.

Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.

Contact me through ykjorlien@gmail.com or through my contact form. Contribute to the conversation about dead people & archaeology at the Reluctant Archaeology Group on Facebook. Check up on me through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop Yvonne a line at ykjorlien@gmail.com

---

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: Who are you, and where do you work? And what’s going on?

Brie Smith: Yes, I just want to thank you Yvonne for having me on today. I am Brienna Smith, I go by Brie, and I am the Chief Operating Officer at Return Home. We specialize in an end-of-life option. That is an alternative to burial. And cremation, we call it terramation. And it is the gentle breakdown of the body into compost, to return to families in place ashes, or in place of a burial.

Yvonne Kjorlien: okay, I’m just gonna bottom line, this and say that it’s human composting.

Brie Smith: Human composting, body composting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. I understand that, yeah, this is a sensitive topic.

Brie Smith: It is.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Anything involving death is, but on the other hand, sometimes you just got to come right out and just say it.

Brie Smith: Yes, I have a lot of people in my life who have become very accustomed to me, very casually talking about their inevitable demise. So,

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s funny how it suddenly becomes a topic of conversation more often than not, right?

Brie Smith: Does with me at least. Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. All right, tell us a bit about Return Home and how you came to be at Return Home, and its inception and all of that great stuff.

Brie Smith: Sure, sure. I can kind of start at the beginning. So, Washington state past unprecedented legislation in January 2019 and that was for funeral directors to begin offering what’s called natural organic reduction in the law, but the layman would call it human composting. And what happened is there was a general kind of panic amongst the industry and the area because there was really no prescribed method in which to accomplish what they were giving us laws to do. So they gave us the rules and regulations but they give us any processes or, machinery or anything that would end up making up what we at Return Home have built. So our CEO — his name is Micah Truman — he was sitting with his mom one day — she lives on Lopez Island — and she had some friends from New York in town, and they were sitting in a circle and Micah said, “Did you hear about this crazy thing? They’re gonna be composting bodies.” And these women are in, maybe they’re late 70s, and they all were like, we love it. We think it’s fabulous, ship me to Washington because I’m in New York. And in that moment he had this, clear vision of the fact that this is actually something that people really resonate with is, the natural breakdown of the body as opposed to something kind of expedited or being preserved and definitely a lot of people really are innately drawn to kind of a natural breakdown. And so that was kind of the inception point of. I can do something with this.

So what Micah did is he went to a group of individuals they are called mortality composters. Mortality composters are individuals who help with ranchers and farmers when they have a mast devastation of a group of animals. If it’s a flock of chickens, or if it’s a herd of cows, or some pigs, what happens is these mortality composters will go to the place where the devastation happened and they will set up the temporary composting facility where they will take those animals, make them into compost that the farmer or rancher can then use to enrich their property. And so, that is what’s happening, and it’s an old science. It’s a die-old science and it’s actually done throughout the whole United States in Canada. But these people had a very specific way to compost these animals and it was very — what some might consider — irreverent to a human being’s body. So they might stack the animals up and coat them and something nitrogen-rich like chicken feces and then they would break down super fast in a big pile because they’re all real hot. And these things were where the minds of the mortality composters were and then Micah came in with the mind of we need to make this acceptable for human care, and for the love that we want to show people when they pass away and to be able to present this to a family.

So ultimately, it took about two and a half years of Micah working with the mortality composters. I joined in about in about two years in, and also helped with kind of the idea that we wanted to make the service hands-on for families. But really the entire development of our vessel system and the organics that go inside our off-gassing and our biofilters, all of that was done with Micah and a group of what we call the Oceans 11 Team of, again, mortality composters and PhDs in composting. These are HVAC people who helped us build the facility, general contractors, and then of course, funeral professionals. So we all came together, again, two and a half years after inception. So, we opened to serve families in June of 2021, and we so have been in operation for just over two years. And we’ve served over 200 families.

I joined with Return Home after being a traditional funeral home employee. I had been in the industry since 2011 and I am still a licensed funeral director, embalmer and crematory operator. I was really drawn to Return Home because of the final product, really what we’re giving families back in place of ashes. I had worked the crematory primarily — it’s about 90% cremation in the county that I live in and worked in — and I didn’t take to cremating. It was not something I enjoyed doing. It was a very quick and kind of aggressive process that I never quite felt great doing and so when this opportunity came with Return Home and Micah knew that I was kind of into green options, it was a really natural fit together and it’s been my pleasure to grow from the services manager of the company to now to again COO and overseeing all of the operations, both in the family services and the composting itself.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, that’s a lot. Tha