Want to be buried or cremated? For Martha Stewart, there is a third option: composted.
The 84-year-old lifestyle guru and author recently appeared as a guest on the QVC+ and HSN+ podcast “50+ & Unfiltered” and revealed she has already thought about her funeral plans. During the wide-ranging interview, host Shawn Killinger asked Stewart if she would like to be buried or cremated when her time comes.
Stewart replied, “Oh, I’m going to be composted,” in a clip shared on Instagram.
She explained, “When one of my horses dies, we dig a giant hole really deep in one of my fields — we have a pet cemetery — and the horse is wrapped in a clean white linen sheet and very carefully dropped down into this giant, lovely grave. I want to go there.”
When Killinger wondered if Stewart could legally bury herself on her property, the TV personality said she wasn’t sure but didn’t see how her decision would impact anyone else.
“Why not?” Stewart responded. “It’s not going to hurt anyone. It’s my property.”
She said the more traditional options are not for her.
“These coffin things and all that stuff? No way,” Stewart added.
Fans reacted to Stewart’s desire to be composted in the comments.
“Yes green burials are a thing, and so beautiful,” one said and added a heart emoji.
Another wrote, “I love her life philosophy. She considers everything, even death, down to the very last detail.”
A third joked that a buried Stewart “might generate power.”
The entrepreneur opting to avoid an urn or a casket isn’t a new trend. NBC News reported in September 2022 that California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill to allow “natural organic reduction” by 2027, meaning a deceased person can be placed in a steel vessel with wood chips and composted. The practice, which was approved in four other states at the time, is referred to as “human composting” or “terramation.” Washington was the first state to legalize human composting in 2019.
The process involves a funeral service provider decomposing the body, which takes around two months, to create 1-2 cubic yards of compost, NBC News explained.
NPR reported in 2024 that the composting process for Recompose, a human composting facility in Seattle, cost around $7,000.
However, at the time some religious organizations, like the California Catholic Conference, pushed back on the practice.
Bishops from the California Catholic Conference said human composting “risks people treading over human remains without their knowledge,” in a statement obtained by NPR, “while repeated dispersions in the same area are tantamount to a mass grave.”
Still, the green funeral trend has picked up over the last few years.
The National Funeral Directors Association’s data as of Sept. 29 shows that the number of people interested in exploring green funeral options due to environmental benefits has increased to 61.4%, up from 55.7% in 2021.
The number of states that have legalized human composting has also increased to 13, according to an NBC affiliate in San Diego.
“As more states consider legislation, human composting represents a growing shift toward sustainable death care options,” NBC 7 San Diego reporter Ana Cristina Sánchez explained.
Sánchez also spoke to co-founder of Earth Funeral Tom Harries who shared in the segment, “The idea of a gentle, natural process that doesn’t produce any man-made CO2 and that returns you to nature resonated with me a lot.”
He added, “The beauty of this process is what you can do with the soil. You can keep it, you can scatter it in a meaningful place or places and you can plant things with it.”
