Burials: Insufficient legal basis for the plan to compost corpses in a fast

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“Cocoon” of the new form of burial “reburial”: There is a lack of scientific data

Photo: Christian Charisius / dpa

The Schleswig-Holstein Ministry of Justice and Health (MJG) considers the legal basis of the pilot project for composting corpses, which was launched almost two years ago (SPIEGEL 39/2023), to be inadequate. This emerges from a letter from the MJG to the Federal Association of German Undertakers (BDB) from the beginning of January. It says: In order to “create greater legal certainty,” “an additional legal framework must be created.”

When SPIEGEL asked whether this meant that there were complaints about the previous regulations, an MJG spokesman replied: "Yes."

From February 2022, the country tolerated the accelerated decomposition of corpses known as “reburial” and their subsequent burial in a cloth. The central basis for the decision was a report by the lawyer Torsten F. Barthel, who viewed the procedure as a “special form of burial.” The ministry has now moved away from this: "The possibility of subsumption", i.e. legal subordination, "of the procedure to burial in the ground will not be pursued further after further detailed examination," explained a ministry spokesman when asked.

Unproven claims

It is incomprehensible why the ministry followed the expert in his already questionable classification of corpse composting as a variant of burial in the ground. In his report, Barthel writes that "the natural heat" in the decomposition tank destroys "harmful pathogens and even drug residues in the corpse and causes changes at the molecular level, whereby nutrient-rich soil is formed." Scientific or whatever other evidence provided for his claims Barthel none. This apparently didn't bother the responsible MJG employee. He noted in the note on which the toleration was based: “The report submitted by Prof. Dr. Barthel is convincing on many points.«

Even a cursory internet search should have made one suspicious. In the Netherlands, the Health Council, an expert committee that advises the government, had already rejected the composting of corpses in 2020. In a statement for the Ministry of the Interior it says: "The committee has found that there is a lack of scientific data as no studies on human composting have been published to date." However, the composting of pigs, the end product of which has to be burned, has been carefully researched. because there is no guarantee that highly dangerous pathogens would be completely destroyed through composting.

Criticism of methodology

The Association of German Undertakers had criticized the “reinterment”, among other things with reference to the statements made by the Dutch, arguing that there was no reliable evidence on biological safety and occupational safety. The results of a recent study carried out on behalf of the re-earthing provider “My Earth” do not change this, according to Tade Spranger, Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Bonn. Spranger, one of the experts that the MJG asked for an opinion on the current draft of a new version of the state burial law, criticizes the scope and methodology of the contract research: "If out of 50 planned composting operations, only 16 were carried out and only two were examined - with the reburial “The material submitted by the company cannot be said to produce scientifically reliable results.”

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