Washington's statute lists four ways to lay a body to rest

The most concise picture of where American funeral service is heading isn’t in a trend report. It’s in the heading of a Washington State statute — RCW 68.50.110: “Burial, cremation, alkaline hydrolysis, or natural organic reduction.”

One sentence of law, four lawful ways to lay a body to rest. Two of them are words most families have never said out loud.

What the statute actually says

The operative text is short enough to quote whole: human remains “must be decently buried, undergo cremation, alkaline hydrolysis, or natural organic reduction within a reasonable time after death.” That’s a legislature putting all four dispositions in the same sentence, on the same footing — the two everyone knows, plus alkaline hydrolysis (the process families usually hear called water cremation) and natural organic reduction (the one they hear called human composting).

The names families use aren’t the names the law uses, and that gap is itself worth a director’s attention. A family asking about “composting” at an arrangement conference is asking a legal question as much as a preference — is that lawful here? — and the answer lives in your state’s statute, under vocabulary the family has never heard.

The demand signal, as published

Interest in this column of the map is not hypothetical. On NFDA’s media center — figures current as of its September 2025 update — 61.4% of consumers said they would be interested in exploring green funeral options, per NFDA’s 2025 Consumer Awareness and Preferences Report. In 2021 that figure was 55.7%. Six points in four years, in one direction.

Read it beside the bigger migration on the same page: NFDA projects the 2025 cremation rate at 63.4% against a 31.6% burial rate, with cremation expected to reach 82.3% by 2045. Every funeral director working today either watched or inherited the burial-to-cremation shift — a disposition map that redrew itself inside one working lifetime. The green column is the same kind of line, earlier on its curve. Nobody can say today how far it runs. The honest claim is narrower: the interest is measured, published, and growing, and at least one state legislature has already rewritten its most basic disposition sentence to make room.

The count nobody should quote

Here is where this post deliberately refuses to do the thing you’d expect: it will not tell you how many states permit natural organic reduction or alkaline hydrolysis.

Not because the number doesn’t exist — because every version of it you’ll encounter is an aggregator’s count, they disagree with each other, and any of them goes stale the month a legislature acts. A wrong count in a legal-adjacent conversation is the expensive kind of wrong: it either tells a family something is lawful where it isn’t, or sends business away from something that’s been lawful for a year.

What a funeral home actually needs isn’t the national tally. It’s one state’s answer, verified — yours. The method is the same one this post used for Washington: go to your legislature’s own site, find the disposition section of your funeral or public-health code, and read the list. If the words “alkaline hydrolysis” or “natural organic reduction” appear, you have your answer from the primary source. If they don’t, you have that answer too — for now. Your licensing board’s rules follow the statute, not the trade press.

What the moving map asks of a funeral home

Three practical things, none of which require offering a new disposition tomorrow.

Vocabulary. When the question comes — and the 61.4% says it will — “let me tell you exactly what’s lawful in this state” is a stronger answer than a guess in either direction. Directors who can name all four dispositions calmly, including the two they don’t offer, read as the authority in the room.

A referral answer. Where a requested disposition isn’t available through your funeral home, the useful version of “no” includes what you can do — which providers you’d trust, what you’d handle on your end. Families remember who solved the problem, even when the solution wasn’t in the building.

A service answer. The disposition and the gathering are separating anyway — the memorial without the funeral is already the shape of a growing share of services. A family choosing an unfamiliar disposition still needs everything else a funeral home does: the gathering, the record of who came, the aftercare. The dispositions column of the map is moving; the reasons families walk through your door move much more slowly.

The forecast written in law

A statute is a lagging indicator of everything except itself — by the time a disposition method is named in one, everything it takes to move a legislature has already happened. That’s what makes Washington’s four-word list worth a director’s attention in any state: it’s a forecast that has already survived a legislature. The funeral homes that fared best across the cremation shift weren’t the ones who guessed the endpoint. They were the ones who noticed the line moving early and made sure no family ever heard them say a disposition’s name for the first time.