burial

Forget Cremation, Get Eaten When You Die

- Adam Clare

hands

You will die. It’ll happen to everyone, yet too often people don’t think about the practical aspects in advance. One often overlooked question is what to do with your body when you’re done with it. In North America popular ways to be rid of one’s body are cremation (which requires oodles of energy and is quite bad for the planet), and displaying the corpse (which is requires oodles of chemicals that are bad for the planet). A safe, clean, and fast way to help bodies decompose is a burial container filled with mushrooms and it’s now available in Canada.

“If you compare it to wood [coffins] or even metal, those things take decades. And here, we’re talking about days or months,” he explained to me from Delft, in the Netherlands. On its website, Loop Biotech claims the coffin adds to the “biodiversity of the soil” around it as it degrades, and Hendrikx says other coffins may also contain chemical additives that could leach into the soil. Hendrikx estimates Loop Biotech has sold more than 2,000 cocoons in Europe, and has just started in North America.
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Valentine, also on the board of the Green Burial Society of Canada, sees natural burials as inclusive of different family rituals and desires, but can be as simple as burying a body in a shroud and ensuring native grasses and plants grow above. What’s more, an environmentally conscious death doesn’t need to be about measuring emissions.

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The Future of Green Burials Lies in the Past

- Adam Clare

The modern funeral industry took something that was natural and safe and converted it into a toxic-filled death. When people die we need to dispose of the body in an appropriate way to ensure diseases don’t spread, human civilizations have been doing this for millennia.

However, in the past hundred years we have started taking corpses and filling them with toxic chemicals which means we can’t bury the bodies like we used to. Toxic corpses are more dangerous than non-toxic ones and this has caused people to reflect on what to do.

Green burials are growing in popularity as a result. Indeed, we first looked at green burials back in 2007.

Green burials are the minimalist, eco-conscious burials of the future, but emerging from a history deeply rooted in the past. The dead are wrapped in cloth shrouds or placed in simple coffins made from natural materials like cardboard or pine and buried in a green space, such as a rural or woodland area. “It turns a gruesome procedure into something more natural and celebratory,” explained Mark Harris, author of Grave Matters: A Journey through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial.

He describes the process as, “returning a body into the earth, where it’s allowed to degrade naturally, renourish soil, push up a tree, rejoin a natural cycle of life.” And, green funerals are much cheaper, with most costing in the low thousands, whereas the median cost for a funeral requiring a vault comes in at over $8,000. According to Harris, “the current cemetery functions less as a resting ground for the dead than a landfill of non-biodegradable and sometimes hazardous materials.”

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