Is composting bodies a good idea for this culture? In parts of India/Persia the dead have long been put out on a platform on a mountain top and left for birds to consume.  I wrote a play in which the hero demands -to the consternation of everybody else - that his body be put out for animals to consume.  

Traveling in Italy and Turkey we’ve seen many empty old sarcophagi, big 3x8ft, cut-stone boxes wherein bodies were placed to decompose: sar (flesh) cophagi (eat).  Eat the flesh.  That seems to explain what happened to the flesh that had been on the bones that ended in catacombs.

Bodies were decomposed,  bones took up less space underground than we we use with coffin-sarcophogi we use buried with the body.

Catacomb workers artfully arranged all the bones together. I like the aesthetic sensibility you can see in these catacomb pictures. (google: pictures catacomb bones.) Tender care plus a wish to create attractive patterns with bones are evident. They didn't just dump bones in the catacomb.  Early modern cave art.

Read about places like Hart Island, the island of the dead, in New York City. They're now digging up over a million skeletons of people who died without friends or families and were buried there in a pauper's grave. It sounds like the operators didn't realize they were using the ground itself as a gigantic sarcophagus.  Now they have the bones to deal with. Some have recommended those bones should be cremated in power plants to create electricity, which could be seen as a kind of resurrection, a coming of the light. A special day could be set aside for the burning of the bones. A happy holiday like the Mexican Day of the Dead. It's an idea that could spread.

 The nuns in my school would not have liked that idead, though.  They taught us that cremation disobeyed God's Law. God planned to raise all bodies from the dead and judge at the Final Judgment whether they would spend eternity in heaven or hell. I didn’t think about it when I was a kid, but now I can see the cremations would have been a good way for felons to escape both the Final Judgment and the eternal fires of hell.  Dust to dust.

Woody Allen explored resurrection in Sleeper.  

Pioneers moving west are said to have covered their dead along the way with a pile of rocks “so critters won’t get at them” - sounds like a kind of “loose stone" sarcophagus.  Today, anthropologists at the University of  Tennessee, Knoxville (?) have a study going on in an uninhabited area. It’s called the “Body Farm.” Bodies are put out around the Farm on the ground in various ways and the process of decomposition gets studied scientifically, step by step. It’s a way for anthropologists to study other cultures without having to go there.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_farm

The New York Times article (link below) includes a picture of a machine at the University of Washington that is used to speed up decomposition. It is like a sarcophagus American style; monetize the process for 5000 bucks a body. It seems to include lawn grass as an essential ingredient in decomposition.

Green. Yes. Perhaps future green families could install a box on the roof when they put in solar. I can imagine a nice ritual associated with sending the dead to heaven or to the cosmos - your choice - leaving behind only bones to be ground up and scattered on the flower garden. Feed the birds, feed the flowers. The box could be left open for birds or closed for bugs. Could cause neighborhood problems, tho.

Then, of course there’s Green Burial,at Memorial Ecosystems, the process that Kimberley and Billy Campbell in Westminster, SC, began in the USA about 20 years ago. Get a forest and a licence, survey, then dig hole, put in a body, join the natural processes of decomposition, and protect nature by slowing development of forests.  That objective is a good Green objective and would help protect natural lands that are now at risk of development.  Billy and Kimberley would like to see a million acres protected.

( Read the NYTimes article that stimulated these ideas composting here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/26/us/death-human-compost.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage