Katrina Spade is the founder and CEO of Recompose, a public benefit corporation leading the transformation of the funeral industry. Katrina is a designer and the inventor of a system that transforms the dead into soil (aka human composting).
Since founding Recompose in 2017, Katrina and her team have led the successful legalization of human composting, also called natural organic reduction (NOR), beginning with Washington State in 2019. Recompose became the first company in the world to offer the service in December 2020. Human composting is now also legal in Oregon, Colorado, Vermont, California, New York, and Nevada.
Katrina and her team have been featured in Fast Company, NPR, the Atlantic, BBC, Harper’s Magazine, and the New York Times. She is an Echoing Green Fellow, an Ashoka Fellow, and a Harvard Kennedy School Visiting Social Innovator.
