Greener Funerals

As more and more people become eco-conscious and environmentally aware, they change their habits and lifestyles in the hopes they’re helping more than they’re hurting the world. Most of us have heard about reducing our impacts through recycling and composting. What a lot of people aren’t aware of, though, is that they have options to reduce their impact of death on our environment.

Corpse management changed a lot over the years. It used to be the norm that families would care for their dead and handle the other aspects of the death of loved ones. Over time, we’ve moved from personally caring for bodies less and less and relying on mortuary and funeral homes more and more.

The art of embalming has been around for a very long time. Ancient civilizations employed different ways of providing meaning in death. Only in the last two hundred fifty years has the world used formaldehyde to preserve the dead. Formaldehyde embalming became more of a necessity when body transport became unmanageable (and disgusting) during times of war and pestilence.

In the last hundred years, we’ve moved to be more industrial-centric when it comes to handling death. Colleges teach mortuary science, and states require licensing. Body disposal is considered unclean and dangerous. Rumors abound about death and disease. Lobbyists convinced legislatures and the public that death is unnatural.

There’s only one problem. Embalming today creates a toxic brew of chemicals that requires special (and often incomplete) measures to prevent those toxins from leaching into the soil. Our idea of peaceful repose and green grass surrounding our loved ones means that we have extra expense to purchase caskets that require more materials to house bodies. Then we must enclose those caskets in concrete to reduce ground-sinking so that cemetery caretakers can mow when bodies inevitably decay.

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None of this is environmentally friendly. It monetarily costs us so much that an entire industry evolved for people to have funereal insurance to cover after-death expenses.

Depending on the laws of where you live, there are ways to bury bodies without involving chemicals. Embalming isn’t a legal requirement in a lot of places. Neither do we have to settle on expensive caskets or regular cemeteries to bury our loved ones.

In my state, Minnesota, you can even bury your dead in your backyard as long as you do so within three days of death and follow state laws. BYOS (bring your own shovel) might sound like an extreme way to observe someone’s passing, but death is a natural process. We don’t have to make it unnatural by adding cancer-causing chemicals into the mix.

There are other options to reduce costs but to also give back after death: Green burial and composting.

Green burial revolves around avoiding chemicals, extra emissions, and processes by only using biodegradable materials. A tree may be planted on the gravesite rather than a physical marker like a headstone. Composting takes this idea one step further. Bodies buried within biodegradable materials are designed to cause natural processes to take over and turn death into soil for reuse and renewal elsewhere.

Again, different places have different laws, but more and more entrepreneurs have come out on the side of safer, environmental ways to reduce death impacts on the living. We’re fortunate to live in a time that gives us so many options to improve our environment. It may take a little extra work, but returning our views on death to nature will save us all in the long run.

For those who want to learn more, here are some resources about carbon-saving burials:

https://www.youtube.com/user/OrderoftheGoodDeath

https://recompose.life/

https://www.prairiecreekconservationcemetery.org/

https://www.greenburialcouncil.org/