ANGLESEY — Kristoffer Hughes, a broadcaster, author and leader of the Anglesey Druid Order who spent three decades working for coroners across the United Kingdom and abroad as a specialised mortuary technician, has announced that he and colleague Chris Cooper-Hayes have founded a venture called Eterrna to launch what they hope will be the UK's first human composting service. The pair are among the first people from Britain to be trained in the terramation process at Return Home, the world's first large-scale human composting facility, south of Seattle in Washington state.

Human composting, also known as terramation, is a process in which the body of a person who has died is placed in a sealed vessel containing organic matter, and over several weeks the remains turn completely to soil. At the Return Home facility, bodies are placed in a sealed vessel containing organic materials such as alfalfa, straw and wood chips, and after 60 days all that remains is a rich, fertile soil that is returned to families to use for growing plants.

Terramation is not legal in the UK, but the Law Commission for the UK government is due to publish a consultation on new funerary methods, including human composting, imminently. A Ministry of Justice official said, "We are aware of the growing interest in alternative funerary methods and we will respond to the Law Commission's report in due course."

Hughes said he was confident that a terramation service would be comparable with the cost of traditional funerals once established, noting that the cost of the service in the United States was considerably cheaper than a traditional funeral. Research published by SunLife in its annual study into funeral costs found that the average price of a simple funeral in the UK last year was £3,800, with an additional £1,300 spent on flowers and catering. More than half of services were cremations, and burials cost about £1,000 more.

"I genuinely didn't think there was anything left to surprise me in the death service world," Hughes said of his visit to the Return Home facility. "It felt like being immersed in summer. I was surrounded by natural organic materials. It smelt good. And I realised at that moment that my body was not going to be disposed of, but rather transformed."

"Of all the ways I've seen death handled around the world, this felt the most natural, the most honest - and the most hopeful," Hughes said. "Human composting gives us another option - one that's deeply ecological and spiritually meaningful."

In the U.S., the Catholic Church has campaigned against human composting wherever legislation has been introduced to implement it. In 2022, when New York State was preparing to approve human composting, the state's Catholic Conference urged voters to contact the governor to voice opposition.

Dr. William Price was put on trial in Cardiff in 1884 for trying to cremate his five-month-old son and was acquitted, leading to a new law allowing cremation in the UK. A process known as water cremation was recently legalised in Scotland as a new funeral method.