Georgia’s Only Human Composting License Went to Decatur

A.S. Turner & Sons in Decatur now runs Georgia’s only licensed human composting vessel, after Gov. Brian Kemp signed the practice into law on May 9, 2025. The funeral home’s own page for terramation at its Decatur facility calls the shop the Southeast’s first state-licensed organic human reduction plant and says it will take bodies from Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee when arrangements allow.

That outcome was baked into the bill. Sen. Rick Williams, a Republican from Milledgeville who owns a funeral home, carried it. Cy Hume, Turner’s president and CEO, helped get it to the floor. West Coast firms that talked up Atlanta still turn Georgia bodies into soil somewhere else.

Decatur Has the Southeast’s First Licensed Vessel

Human composting, which the code calls organic human reduction and the trade often calls terramation, puts a body in a closed vessel with plant matter such as alfalfa, straw and wood chips. Heat, moisture and microbes break the remains down into soil. Families can take that soil, use it to plant, or send it to a conservation project.

On July 15, 2026, The Natural Funeral, a Colorado maker of Terramation systems, said A.S. Turner & Sons had finished installing a TerraCare vessel and was waiting on final state certification. Hume said then that the home was talking with a local cemetery so families could put the soil back in the ground. The Decatur shop now states, in its own words, that the facility is state-licensed and open for the work.

The address is 2773 N Decatur Road. Families can still hold a visitation, funeral or memorial before the vessel is sealed. Hume has described the method in plain terms: you reduce someone’s body down to soil.

Georgia was the first Southern state to allow the process, and it remains the only one in the region with a licensed vessel. That is a narrower win than the signing-day talk. Legal and available are still two different things for most of the South.

A Funeral-Home Senator Wrote the Composting Rules

Williams dropped the measure in the Senate hopper on February 21, 2025. He did not sell it as a culture-war stunt. “It’s just human composting,” he told colleagues. Sen. Bill Cowsert, the Athens Republican who chaired the committee, admitted the hearing caught him flat-footed.

You’re blowing my mind here today because I didn’t know this was allowed.

Bill Cowsert, then chairman of the Senate Regulated Industries and Utilities Committee

Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat from the 44th District, worked the other side of the aisle. She named her partners in public.

I worked with Sen. Rick Williams and Cy Hume with A.S Turner Funeral Home to bring this legislation to Georgia. This bill supports the funeral industry and exemplifies how businesses, government and regular citizens can work together to create opportunities and solutions.

Elena Parent, Georgia state senator

That last sentence is the plot. Parent said she wanted an option for constituents who asked for an environmentally conscious process. She also said the bill supports the funeral industry. Hume had already been sending Georgia cases to a Seattle affiliate and taking the soil back. The Capitol did not have to invent a new trade. It had to license one the incumbents could run.

Williams told the committee Georgia had no rules for composting the dead and that he wanted to avoid a repeat of what happened in Noble, Ga. Operators would need licenses, inspections and the right equipment. The jokes in the room did not slow the count.

THE PATH OF SB 241

1. February 21, 2025: Williams introduces the bill in the Senate hopper.
2. March 4, 2025: The Senate passes it 52-1, with one member not voting and two excused.
3. March 31, 2025: The House passes it 157-4, with three not voting and 16 absent.
4. May 9, 2025: Kemp signs Act 82, which is Senate Bill 241.
5. July 1, 2025: The law takes effect and the State Board of Funeral Service can license organic human reduction facilities.
6. July 15, 2026: The Natural Funeral says Turner’s TerraCare system is in and certification is imminent.

The floor votes were not close. Georgia did not legalize the method after a long public brawl. It folded a new disposition into the same chapter of code that already covers funeral directors, embalmers and crematories, when Georgia first legalized human composting in May 2025.

What a Georgia Composting Facility Must Include

The enrolled text reads like a funeral-home checklist, because that is what it is. A new organic human reduction facility needs a separate license from the Georgia State Board of Funeral Service, housed under the Secretary of State. The plant has to sit at a specific address. It has to look, on paper, like a place that already buries and burns the dead.

MINIMUM GEAR UNDER THE STATUTE

• A service room: Seating for at least 30 people so a funeral can be held on site.
• A display room: An adequate supply of containers for the finished soil.
• A hearse: At least one operable motor hearse, owned or leased, with current Georgia registration.
• A vessel: At least one operable organic human reduction container, one body at a time unless the legally authorized person gives written permission.
• A processing station: Equipment to grind the reduced remains until no recognizable skeletal tissue is left.
• A church truck: The same rolling bier a funeral home already uses to move a casket.
• A setback: A new stand-alone plant cannot sit within 1,000 feet of a platted residential subdivision.

The 1,000-foot line applies to stand-alone plants that were not operating on July 1, 2025, and that do not sit on or next to a funeral establishment’s land. A shop that already has a chapel and a lot can add a vessel without that distance fight. A plant that does reduction only for other funeral homes can skip the 30-seat room, the display room and the church truck. The Board may inspect reduction containers every five years and must run annual inspections of reduction facilities on weekdays between 8:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.

Board rules also tell a facility to sample each reduction, test for physical contaminants such as intact bone, dental fillings and medical implants, and keep the funeral director in full and continuous charge on a Board-approved natural organic reduction course. This is not a backyard compost pile with a permit sticker. It is a crematory-style license with soil at the end.

THE SCALE OF THE NEW OPTION

• State count: Fourteen states had legalized the process by September 2026, with Georgia the first in the South.
• Floor votes: The Senate tally was 52-1 and the House tally was 157-4.
• Funeral-home median: The National Funeral Directors Association’s 2023 general price list study put a funeral with casket and burial at $8,300 and a funeral with cremation at $6,280, cemetery costs excluded.
• Green interest: NFDA’s 2025 consumer survey found 61.4% of respondents interested in green funeral options, up from 55.7% in 2021.

Those medians are why a $7,000 soil process can clear a family’s comparison shop. Recompose, the Seattle public-benefit firm founded by Katrina Spade, charges $7,000. Return Home, the Auburn, Washington, company run by Micah Truman, quoted about $7,000 including shipping when the Georgia bill became law. A burial funeral’s cemetery plot, vault and marker sit on top of the $8,300 figure and can rival the funeral home’s own bill.

Return Home’s Atlanta Plant Never Opened

Truman praised the signing and said Return Home was laying the groundwork for a facility in Atlanta. “The state, I think, is really well suited to what we do,” he said. “We’re extremely excited to begin the planning to open a facility in Georgia.” Until that plant existed, Georgians could ship a body to Auburn, a 16,000-square-foot shop with 74 vessels, for about nine weeks in alfalfa, straw and sawdust.

The Atlanta building did not follow. In a later interview Truman put Minnesota first and Georgia later, because the Georgia regulations were still taking shape. Return Home still serves all 50 states from Washington. The Georgia Funeral Directors Association was an early conversation partner. Conversation is not a certificate on the wall in Decatur.

Earth Funeral, founded by Tom Harries, took a different East Coast bet. In May 2026 it opened a 37,000-square-foot plant in Elkridge, Maryland, designed for up to 126 vessels, the first human composting facility on the East Coast. The company’s Georgia page is blunt: it processes Georgia cases in Maryland, with local funeral homes handling the first days and the soil work done out of state. Auburn, Washington, and Las Vegas, Nevada, are the other Earth plants on that list. There is no Earth vessel in Georgia.

Spade’s Recompose has processed more than 600 people, about 20% of them from out of state, and holds more than 2,000 people in a prepaid “Precompose” trust at the $7,000 price. The firm already had an affiliate tie to A.S. Turner before the Georgia license existed. Legalization did not shove the Seattle companies out. It let a century-old Decatur home stop shipping quite so many cases across the country.

WHERE A GEORGIA BODY ACTUALLY GOES

Earth Funeral quotes a 30 to 45 day process and about 250 lbs of soil per person, with leftover soil donated to conservation if a family does not want all of it. It also claims an average cremation puts out 535 lbs of carbon dioxide. Those figures are the company’s. Turner has described the work as roughly a month. Return Home’s nine-week clock is a different machine and a different recipe. The soil is not a standard bag size across the trade.

Soil Goes Home and Bishops Want a Grave

The loudest public argument is not about Decatur’s license. It is about whether that soil could end up on food. Viral posts treat the 14-state map as a pipeline from the funeral home to the salad aisle. Licensed operators do not describe the product that way. Earth Funeral tells families to plant, spread or share the soil, to check local rules before putting it on public land, and to send the rest to habitat projects. Recompose has partnered with land trusts. The Georgia statute is about disposition of human remains, not about selling compost into farms.

The Catholic Church’s objection is older and cleaner than the food-chain rumor. On March 23, 2023, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine issued a 2023 statement on bodily remains that took up both human composting and alkaline hydrolysis. Burial remains the preferred rite. Cremation is allowed if it is not chosen for reasons contrary to the faith. Composting, the committee said, does not meet the test.

At the end of the human composting process, the body has completely decomposed along with accompanying plant matter to yield a single mass of compost, with nothing distinguishably left of the body to be laid to rest in a sacred place.

USCCB Committee on Doctrine, On the Proper Disposition of Bodily Remains

After cremation, the bishops noted, powdered remains can still go in an urn and into consecrated ground. After composting, they said, a family is invited to spread a volume of compost on a lawn, a garden or a wilderness site. Georgia’s law does not require a Catholic cemetery to take that soil. It also does not ask the Church to bless the vessel. Hume’s cemetery talks are a practical answer to a religious and civic question the statute left open: where, exactly, does a cubic load of a person go.

Five Neighboring States Still Have No Local Option

Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina have not enacted natural organic reduction laws. Turner’s page treats that gap as a service area. A family in Jacksonville or Charlotte that wants soil instead of ash still has to cross a state line, and Decatur is now the closest licensed door.

Fourteen states are on the books: Washington, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, California, New York, Nevada, Arizona, Maryland, Delaware, Minnesota, Maine, Georgia and New Jersey. Washington went first in 2019, with the law in force in May 2020. New Jersey became the 14th in September 2025. California’s law is on the books but providers there have not been able to take families on the same timetable. New York’s rules have lagged the statute. Legalization keeps outrunning construction, which is how Georgia spent a full year after July 1, 2025, as a legal state with no local vessel.

Oklahoma’s House and Senate passed a composting bill in 2026, then the governor vetoed it on May 12. Illinois moved a bill through the House and lost it before a Senate vote, with the state’s Catholic conference and its cemetery and funeral association against it. Georgia’s lopsided tallies look less like a national consensus and more like a case where the funeral trade was inside the drafting room.

Cremation is still the volume business. NFDA has projected a 63.4% cremation rate for 2025 against 31.6% burial. That shift, not composting, is what emptied the embalming table. Soil is a third door, not a replacement for flame.

Williams Is Also Unwinding Embalming Licenses

The same senator came back with a second funeral bill. Williams moved to drop mandatory embalming licenses for funeral directors, arguing that burial and cremation customs have changed and that Georgia’s growing Jewish and Muslim communities are part of that shift. Hume backed the logic. David Morrow, then president of the Georgia Funeral Directors Association, said more than 100 members answered a survey and that two-thirds favored the change.

Read together, the two bills are one project. Williams wants the state board to license what funeral homes actually sell, not what they sold when every director also stood over an embalming table. Organic reduction fits that project because it needs no embalming chemicals, no vault and no metal casket. It does need a licensed director, a hearse and a vessel the Board can inspect. The people who already have the first two items were always going to get to the third first.

Micah Truman said he once assumed the market was “Subaru-driving urban Seattle dwellers,” then found as many families in ruby-red Eastern Washington. Georgia’s 52-1 Senate vote is the Southern version of that surprise. The method is legal in a deep-red capitol because a funeral-home senator and a Decatur CEO asked for a license, not because Seattle opened a branch.

Hume is still working on a cemetery partnership so the soil has a plot to go to. Until that deal is done, Georgia’s new option is a steel vessel in Decatur, a stack of out-of-state shipping forms, and a Board rulebook that looks a lot like the old one, with dirt at the end of the form.