Quite a few young Americans plan to end their days as compost

As a 30-year-old architecture student in 2013, Katrina Spade began pondering her mortality. Specifically, what would happen to her body after she died. Ms Spade, who was enrolled at the University of Massachusetts Amherst at the time, was in the minority: only about a fifth of Americans plan their own funerals. Traditional burial, which 44% of Americans choose, didn’t feel right for her, and nor did cremation, which has become the more popular option (see chart). Neither did a “natural burial” which, although pleasingly green, would probably have required her to be laid to rest outside her home city due to lack of space: New York City, for example, banned burials in Manhattan south of 86th Street in 1851. She grew increasingly nonplussed that “there was no urban ecological death-care option” available.