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.
…
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.