I think the difference is that if you go to a funeral home in the US and say "I'd like one burial, plain, no sugar" you will end up dressed in fancy clothes, filled with formaldehyde and a decent amount of sawdust, lying on soft polyester cushions and frills in a fancy varnished hardwood box with a lacquer finish and nearly airtight seal. This goes into the ground and then (I'm less to believe) largely doesn't change for decades.
Whereas if you go to a human composting place and ask to be composted, you get packed into a tube with enough wood chips and straw to create the right carbon to nitrogen ratio and a few scoops of microbes and fungi and held at an optimum temperature and oxygen content until you turn into soil. Then you get delivered in the back of a pickup truck and hopefully someone uses you to plant a tree or something.
Not to say that burial is always mutually exclusive with returning your nutrients to the earth - just that the default approach to burial these days isn't so good at it.
Whereas if you go to a human composting place and ask to be composted, you get packed into a tube with enough wood chips and straw to create the right carbon to nitrogen ratio and a few scoops of microbes and fungi and held at an optimum temperature and oxygen content until you turn into soil. Then you get delivered in the back of a pickup truck and hopefully someone uses you to plant a tree or something.
Not to say that burial is always mutually exclusive with returning your nutrients to the earth - just that the default approach to burial these days isn't so good at it.