Last year, lifestyle icon Martha Stewart created an internet sensation when she told a podcast host that she would pick composting over burial or cremation after she dies. She has Seattle entrepreneur Katrina Spade to thank for making that option an available, legal choice.

While a graduate student studying architecture, Spade set out to create an alternative for putting people to rest — one that offered a climate-friendly, sustainable solution while remaining practical in urban settings and palatable to loved ones.

“Cremation and burial, both are polluting in their own way,” Spade said. “And I don’t want my last gesture to pollute the earth.”

So in 2020, Spade launched her company, Recompose, becoming the first in the U.S. to develop the technology needed for the commercial composting of human bodies. Now 14 states have legalized the practice and more than a dozen others are considering it. Additional companies have joined Recompose in providing the alternative “death care” service and all are looking to scale. One, Earth Funeral, earlier this year opened the first human composting facility on the East Coast.

In comparing funeral options, a cremation produces about 530 pounds of carbon dioxide, roughly equivalent to driving a fuel-efficient car from Seattle to San Diego. Burials consume land and can rely on toxic embalming chemicals, chemically treated caskets, and concrete vaults. Composting requires almost no energy input and produces clean soil.

The process is relatively simple: A deceased person is put in a vessel with natural materials that create the conditions needed for composting. But Spade had to navigate technical and legal hurdles to turn the concept into a business, sparking a new sector within the funeral field.

The science and the law

Stewart and Spade both came to champion human composting by way of horses. When Stewart’s equine pets die, she wraps them in linen and buries them on her land to naturally decay into soil in a process akin to composting.

During her research, Spade discovered a video on horse composting from Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, chair of Washington State University’s Department of Crop and Soil Sciences. Carpenter-Boggs is an expert in the practice, which is routinely applied to livestock like cows and horses. Spade wanted to refine the approach for humans, and the two began collaborating.

They developed a strategy using stainless steel vessels and a blend of straw, alfalfa and wood chips.

“We determined… the best kind of recipe of plant materials that would have the right ratios of carbon and nitrogen, and also the right structural properties to allow air to permeate, because oxygen is critical to this process,” Spade said.

The vessels include thermometers to ensure the body reaches and holds a temperature of 131 degrees Fahrenheit for three consecutive days to destroy pathogens. The heat is generated entirely by naturally occurring microbes.

Before Spade could deploy the technology, she had another problem to solve. She was contacted by Tanya Marsh, a professor and expert in human remains law, who informed Spade that her plan was “completely illegal” in all 50 states, but offered to help her change that.

Spade then turned to her Seattle neighbor, state Sen. Jamie Pedersen, who was coincidentally pursuing another climate-friendly end-of-life alternative called alkaline hydrolysis or water cremation. Pedersen sponsored legislation to legalize composting, and it passed in 2019 with bipartisan support, paving the way for Recompose.

An unexpected appeal

Recompose has created an environment that Spade hopes is comforting for grieving friends and families. The facility features a room for sitting with the deceased, who is wrapped in a natural linen shroud, and a memorial space with vaulted ceilings and green and golden stained-glass windows.

Beyond that is the “greenhouse,” a soil- and straw-scented space containing 33 vessels for composting. Active composting takes about one month; the resulting soil is then removed to “cure” for an additional month to cool and dry out. Bones are broken down mechanically and added back to the soil, while non-organic materials like artificial joints are recycled.

The process creates 20 to 30 bags of a mulch-like material. Friends and families take as much as they like, and Recompose can donate a portion to its partners in land restoration and conservation.

Other companies offering human composting include Return Home and Earth Funeral, which are both based in the Seattle area.

Interest in the death-care alternative has been surprisingly broad.

“I really thought that this was going to be for the Subaru-driving urban Seattle dwellers, and they certainly exist,” said Micah Truman, founder and CEO of Return Home. “But we get as many people from ruby-red Eastern Washington as we do from Seattle or Bellevue.”

While liberals are drawn to the climate benefits, conservative farmers and hunters often feel deeply connected to returning to the land, Truman said. A third segment of customers simply finds traditional burial and cremation unnerving.

Younger generations opt in

In an unexpected turn, younger adults are opting in, too. Elyssa Tappero, a 30-something tsunami program manager for Washington state, is pre-funding her $7,000 Recompose service via $100 monthly installments.

“When I learned how much of an environmental impact there is from cremation, and how expensive some of those things are — and just the entire approach by the funeral industry — I knew that wasn’t something I wanted,” Tappero said.

Spade recognizes that addressing climate change requires much bigger actions than human composting, but is eager to do her part.

“If we can truly and meaningfully change the funeral industry, the way we care for our bodies, and … connect humans even more to the fact that we’re part of that ecosystem, we’re part of the natural world, that would be hugely satisfying,” she said.

Sources and references

Interviews:

• Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose
• Micah Truman, founder and CEO of Return Home
• Elyssa Tappero, customer of Recompose and tsunami program manager for the Washington Emergency Management Division

Additional sources:

• Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, chair of the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Washington State University
• Inside Recompose, where the human composting startup is ready to grow its formula beyond Seattle (GeekWire)
• 50+ & Unfiltered with Shawn Killinger, Episode 124 with Martha Stewart
• The environmental toll of cremating the dead (National Geographic)
• The Potential of Our Decay: Cemeteries That Save the American Landscape (Smithsonian)

AI data centers face mounting community backlash and local moratoriums, while surging power demands knock tech giants off course from their climate ambitions. Could fusion be the solution to both problems, and could two Seattle-area companies provide the fix?

Helion Energy is betting on it. The company signed an unprecedented agreement to sell fusion energy to Microsoft for a Central Washington data center. Armed with a $1.5 billion war chest, Helion is sprinting to reach its 2028 deadline to flip the switch on that power plant, which it hopes will be the world’s first to commercially produce electricity from fusion.

The soaring demand for clean energy is driving interest and investment, said David Kirtley, Helion’s CEO and co-founder. “It’s enabled us to ramp up our timelines and go faster than we had originally planned.”

Nearby, competitor Zap Energy has raised $330 million and secured Department of Energy backing. While ambitious, the startup is taking a more cautious approach. Zap recently announced it will jointly pursue fusion’s conventional cousin — nuclear fission — as a near-term revenue source and a hedge on its fusion bet.

“This isn’t a pivot,” said Benj Conway, Zap’s president and co-founder. “By integrating them into a single platform, we can move faster, reduce risk and build a more enduring company.”

Helion and Zap belong to a global cohort of entrepreneurs trying to harness the power of the sun. Their goal is to create a “star in a jar” here on Earth to produce nearly limitless clean energy. For decades, researchers have chased this milestone — and some believe the industry is finally getting close.

Inside Helion’s sprint to 2028

A visit to Helion starts with a gauntlet of security hurdles: getting past an outdoor guard in a booth, ID checks and stowing phones in locked cubbies. Inside its R&D space in Everett, Wash., Helion operates Polaris, a 60-foot-long, seventh-generation prototype that uses magnets to compress plasma, the super-hot state of matter required for fusion. Here is how it works:

• The Collision: The machine creates magnetic fields at both ends that launch and squeeze tiny blobs of plasma containing light atoms toward the center, where they collide at 1 million miles per hour.
• The Capture: As the ions fuse and release energy, the plasma expands against the magnetic field. This movement creates an electric current captured directly as electricity, similar to regenerative braking in electric vehicles.

The commercial device will ultimately run on isotopes of hydrogen and helium, and aims to reach temperatures of 200 million degrees Celsius — more than 10-times hotter than the center of the sun.

But significant technical hurdles remain. In July 2025, Helion broke ground on its 50-megawatt plant, Orion, in Malaga, Wash. The facility must be operational in two years to meet its contract with Microsoft.

Helion’s approach has been to build larger and larger prototypes as it advances its technology, but the company took a detour this spring to build a fusion device about one-eighth the size of Polaris.

“This is where we’re building the next smaller machine, Tiny Merge,” said Manav Singh, Helion’s director of electrical engineering, on a recent tour. “Step in, right here.”

Behind a massive Wizard of Oz-worthy curtain was the downsized, tubular fusion device. It bristled with metal protuberances that will connect it to power sources to send surges of electricity into the machine.

Tiny Merge could be viewed as a worrisome sign of backtracking to resolve technical issues. However, the company maintains its strategy always left room for smaller devices to allow for faster testing and iterations.

“There’s a few much more deep investigations we want to do,” Singh said. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

Zap’s dual core bet

A four-minute drive from Helion sits rival Zap Energy. The startup is building its technology on a physics phenomenon known as the Z-pinch, which uses a powerful electrical current to generate its own magnetic field to confine plasma.

Zap’s system operates through a distinct process:

• Plasma Generation: Hydrogen gas is injected into the device and blasted with energy, creating a 2-foot-long strand of plasma resembling a tame lightning bolt.
• Heat Absorption: When the Z-pinch triggers fusion, released neutrons are captured by a surrounding liquid metal blanket (bismuth in testing, lithium for commercial use).
• Power Generation: The neutrons carry intense heat, which is then converted into usable energy.

Zap is running three fusion devices that measure about 12 feet long, each focused on fine-tuning a specific challenge in its system.

Despite hitting key milestones, concerns about the timeline for reaching commercially-ready fusion triggered Zap’s move to add fission to its plans, making it the first fusion company to do so.

Zap is now working to deploy a 10-megawatt fission microreactor based on legacy Toshiba designs, giving it a more certain path to an operational power plant than fusion currently offers.

The company says the two strategies share technologies that could accelerate the development of both. A key technical overlap is the use of liquid metals; the fission device is cooled by liquid sodium, which behaves similarly to the liquid bismuth and lithium used in its fusion design.

“Fission gives us a path to deploy. Fusion gives us a path to transform,” Zap CEO Zabrina Johal, said in April. “Bringing them together is how we do both.”

A global clean energy race

More than 50 companies globally are pursuing fusion power, including two additional Pacific Northwest ventures: Seattle-based Avalanche Energy and British Columbia’s General Fusion.

Among the heavily funded contenders is Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Armed with nearly $3 billion, the company plans to build a plant in Virginia, home to the nation’s largest data center hub. China remains another major wildcard, investing billions of undisclosed dollars into its own domestic fusion ventures.

As work continues, enthusiasm grows alongside persistent skepticism. Some experts doubt cost-competitive fusion can ever be achieved, while others believe commercial viability is still decades away — too late to solve the immediate energy needs of the AI boom.

Laura Berzak Hopkins, deputy chief research officer at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, remains cautiously optimistic about the sector’s trajectory.

“We’ve made incredible progress, and we are reaching ever closer, but there still remain these major scientific and technological hurdles,” Berzak Hopkins said. However, she added, “new capabilities and new knowledge really bring us to this exciting cusp.”

Whether Helion and its peers will prove the skeptics wrong remains to be seen, but the data center energy crisis ensures the world will be watching.

Sources and references

Podcast interviews:

• David Kirtley, Helion Energy, CEO and co-founder
• Manav Singh, Helion Energy, director of electrical engineering 
• Matthew Thompson, Zap Energy, senior vice president of fission technology and former vice president of systems engineering and pulsed power
• Laura Berzak Hopkins, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, associate laboratory director for Strategy and Partnerships, and deputy chief research officer

GeekWire’s related coverage:

• Helion gives behind-the-scenes tour of secretive 60-foot fusion prototype as it races to deployment
• Helion makes big bet on ‘Tiny Merge’ fusion testbed to meet aggressive Microsoft timeline
• Inside Zap: Fusion pioneer tries to build ‘a star in a jar’ to unlock abundant clean energy
• Zap Energy’s nuclear double play: Fusion startup adds traditional fission to its lineup, in industry first

As AI and surging demand for power collide with a warming planet, most climate and environmental news can feel a little hopeless — and for good reason. But some scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs are quietly betting that technology can still tip the balance.

Those are the stories we’re telling on Positive Charge, a new podcast launching today, hosted by GeekWire reporter Lisa Stiffler and independent Seattle-based audio producer and journalist Laura Scott. The show goes inside the companies and labs working on environmental solutions, and connects with the people living with the problems they’re trying to solve.

Our thanks to Amazon Sustainability for sponsoring this independent editorial project.

Two episodes are already live: The first explores the “forever chemicals” contaminating water around the world, and the companies that have figured out how to destroy them. The second is about the global race to make fusion energy real, and the startups betting they can deliver nearly limitless clean power. 

Future installments will explore new climate and sustainability breakthroughs every few weeks.

Subscribe to Positive Charge on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Amazon Music, and find every episode at geekwire.com/positivecharge.

It was on something of a lark that Heather Koponen went to a screening of “Dark Waters” — the Mark Ruffalo film about dangerous “forever” chemicals fouling creeks and drinking water.

She really liked the movie and took home a free test kit offered by the nonprofit that organized the event to check her own drinking water for the pollutants, known as PFAS.

Koponen, a retired physician’s assistant, lives on the outskirts of Fairbanks, Alaska, in a home that once belonged to her parents. She knew about PFAS contamination in the area from firefighting foams used at military bases and airports, and had local friends who believed their health had been harmed by the chemicals. Koponen thought she was in the clear given her location relative to potential sources.

“Surprise, surprise, the well that my parents had put in in 1966, had the best-tasting water in the world and was west of the known contamination, turned out to have high levels of PFAS,” Koponen said. “We didn’t believe it, so we tested again, multiple times.”

PFAS — a family of industrial chemicals used in non-stick pans, food packaging, and as a grease and water repellent in clothes and carpets — contaminate water and soil across the U.S. and the world. Most people have detectable levels in their blood.

The chemicals are linked to reduced immune response, developmental delays in children, increased incidence of some cancers and hormonal impacts such as decreased fertility.

As PFAS have spread through the environment, strategies for controlling and destroying the persistent pollutants have been in short supply and extremely costly.

Now, decades into the problem, that’s finally changing. On this debut episode of Positive Charge, GeekWire’s podcast about hope in the sustainability and climate fight, we go inside the effort to build and deploy technologies that can effectively destroy PFAS. Two companies at the forefront are based in Western Washington: Aquagga and Sedron Technologies.

Blasting PFAS in Tacoma

Located in downtown Tacoma, Aquagga does its R&D work inside the Petrich Marine building — a former marble works facility on the industrialized Thea Foss waterway. Inside the cavernous wooden structure, the startup builds devices that treat PFAS pollution from concentrated sources, housed in easy-to-move shipping containers painted bright white.

“We can step inside,” said Brian Pinkard, Aquagga’s co-founder and chief technology officer, letting visitors inside one of the containers. “It’s a little dirty. Watch your step. Just don’t touch anything. That’s the one rule.”

The system uses hydrothermal alkaline treatment, or HALT, blasting PFAS with high temperatures and extremely alkaline conditions — imagine a very strong bleach. Contaminated wastewater flows through the machine, and the process breaks the chemicals into smaller, nonhazardous components, including carbon and fluoride compounds.

What comes out isn’t drinking-water safe, but the technology destroys more than 99.99% of PFAS.

In recent years, Aquagga has treated contaminated water from various sources, including a lined underground pit that once held 20,000 gallons of waste at Fairbanks International Airport. A project with the Department of Defense treated 3,000 gallons of waste in North Carolina. DOD alone has an estimated 2 million gallons of PFAS-containing firefighting foam stockpiled for disposal.

Turning waste into a weapon against PFAS

Sedron wasn’t launched to battle PFAS. It set out to purify sewage waste into drinkable water — which it once served to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

Janicki Industries, an aerospace engineering and manufacturing company, received funding in 2011 from what is now the Gates Foundation. The philanthropy wanted a wastewater purification system for use in developing countries. That project led to the creation of Sedron.

The company developed systems to treat dairy waste and municipal biosolids — the residual product from wastewater treatment plants. Sedron dries the biosolids in an energy-efficient thermal dryer, turning them into a biofuel fed into a biomass boiler. The boiler generates electricity that cycles back to power the dryer and produces excess clean energy sold to the grid.

The system also destroys PFAS that contaminate sewage waste, having escaped from consumer goods or passed through humans.

“When you’ve got biosolids in these thermal systems that are heated above 900 degrees Celsius, they’re in there for over two seconds, and there’s enough turbulence within that system, the literature suggests, that PFAS is destroyed,” said Meghan Carlo, Sedron’s senior permit manager.

Without this treatment, biosolids would typically be returned to the environment as fertilizer spread on farms, golf courses or similar sites — keeping PFAS in circulation.

The long road to clean water

Solutions for cleaning up PFAS exist, but the scale of the problem is staggering. One academic study estimated the cost of removing a subclass of PFAS from the environment at the same rate they are released: somewhere between $20 trillion and $7,000 trillion per year.

In 2024, the Biden administration established the country’s first drinking water limits on six forms of PFAS, setting a ceiling of 4 parts per trillion — roughly a tiny drop of water in five Olympic-sized swimming pools. The Trump administration is moving to cancel limits on four of the six and delay compliance for the other two.

States are forging ahead with their own restrictions on PFAS in drinking water, including monitoring requirements and limits on how and where the chemicals can be used. The resulting liability concerns for municipalities and other stakeholders are stoking demand for cleanup technologies.

Aquagga has devices available for lease, purchase or demonstration projects. Sedron broke ground this year on a regional waste treatment facility in South Florida that will serve municipalities home to 2 million people, with operations expected to begin in 2028.

Fairbanks resident Heather Koponen needs a solution now. Her options include an hour-long round trip to a natural spring to fill five-gallon jugs, deliveries from a local company whose water appears to have low-level PFAS contamination, or PFAS filters similar to a Brita.

But she’s also focused on the bigger picture.

“The most important thing is to stop more contamination,” she said. “We’ve got to think of future generations and the future planet.”

Sources and references

Interviews:

• Brian Pinkard, Aquagga, co-founder and chief technology officer
• Heather Koponen, Fairbanks, Alaska, resident impacted by PFAS
• Stephanie Dotterer, Sedron Technologies, director of strategy
• Meghan Carlo, Sedron Technologies, senior permit manager

Additional sources:

• ‘Forever chemicals’ are eternal no more thanks to a pollution destroying device from Tacoma startup (GeekWire)
• Flush with cash: Washington startup lands up to $500M to deploy facilities treating sewage, dairy waste (GeekWire)
• Bill Gates drinking water from sewage waste (Gates Notes)
• Alaska Community Action on Toxics
• Toxic-Free Future