Green Burials

By Jeff Jorgenson, Elemental Cremation and Burial

When a person dies and you end up in the arrangement room of a traditional funeral home, they will present you with a dizzying array of options. If you make the decision to bury your loved one instead of cremating them [click here for more information about that decision], you have to choose from many options, including: metal or wood casket, concrete liner or burial vault, funeral or memorial service, and visitation services, as well as other accessories and options*. 

Like the rest of the world, each of these decisions has a consequence, but what’s not green about being placed in a park like setting?

Turns out – quite a bit.

I can geek out pretty hard on the topics of environmental impacts in the funeral and cemetery world. The truth is that the way we are doing things right now as an industry is pretty miserable when it comes to caring for our environment.  Let’s look at the big points in the scenario that I’ve just outlined.

Casket selection is where the driving price is in a funeral arrangement. It is the single largest factor in the overall cost of the funeral and, as a general rule, the more expensive the casket, the more detrimental to our planet. High end caskets are made of semi-precious metals (copper or bronze) or hardwood (mahogany, pecan and cherry). The metal caskets are incredibly resource heavy with a massive eco-footprint in mining and processing the metals.  I honestly don’t know what the carbon footprint is on a bronze casket, but it’s got to be yeti big for what its useful life is.  The hardwoods often are exotic and come from unmanaged forestry with deforestation being common in foreign countries. The transportation costs are high both financially and in carbon.

Embalming is the process of replacing bodily fluids with a formalin solution to slow the decomposition process. What this means is that the dead person looks a lot better, and they stay looking that way quite a bit longer.  But the environmental impacts of embalming aren’t good.

Old school funeral people will tell you that there’s no evidence that there is any negative impact and that it is actually helping because of a reduction in transmissible disease and so on.  But stop and think about it: If you dumped two liters of formaldehyde into your kitchen sink, is that doing our ecology one bit of good?  The reality is that no one has actually studied the effects on embalming fluid on the environment. The worst part is that traditional firms still require it for visitation and they often don’t offer alternatives, such as eco-friendly embalming fluids.  

The next item in our little traditional burial scenario isn’t winning eco-elections either. Concrete liners and vaults all fall under the umbrella term of “outer burial container.”  This is a concrete box that is put into the grave that the casket is lowered into. Its purpose is to maintain the integrity of the grave when machinery and people scoot by on top.

In the United States, we bury an estimated 1.5 million people each year. While there is no hard data detailing how many tons of concrete and steel that we are putting into the ground to build vaults for our dead, I’m just going to say that it is A LOT. If you choose a regular cemetery, this is a purchase that you are unlikely to avoid. Cemeteries are the wild west of the industry. They are largely unregulated with the exception of the handling of pre-sale funds and the required “endowment fund.” In other words: Cemetery regulations have to do with money.  It’s the cemetery’s private property, so if they want to make you put your loved one in an ABS plastic reinforced, rebar and concrete box… you get to pony up for it. Sorry.

So what can you do about all of this to green it up?

Let me say that I’m a pragmatist.  We are talking about death.  When a loved one stops breathing, it has been my experience that families are looking for services and products that put their minds at ease. The most important thing to a family at the time of death is that services and products must be familiar. If you haven’t already had a discussion with mom and dad about being buried in a linen shroud in a shallow grave designed for the greatest good for mother earth, you aren’t going to make that leap. It’s too foreign and you’re going to be trying to accommodate what you think would be their wishes.  As a starting point, decide what you and your family are comfortable with and research from there.

When you look to green burial, you will find a continuum of products and services that are available. How green you and your family want to be depends on comfort level. Some of the truly green burial items are just too out there for some families. And some of the traditional things are just unthinkable for the environmentalist.

A “hybrid burial” is what ultimately fits into many family’s wishes. This concept incorporates different green elements. A cemetery may have a natural burial section where outer burial containers aren’t needed or they will allow the placement of a concrete liner upside down so that the body is placed directly on the earth.  Or, you may go completely natural and select a shroud to wrap the body instead of a casket and have placement in a natural burial cemetery.

Here are the bullet points on how you can green things up:

• Talk about what’s going to happen with everyone involved.  If you take nothing else away from this blog, take away the idea that you need to communicate. It’s the first step in finding greener options that work for everyone in the family.
• Research your options. Find out what caskets are available, what cemeteries have green or hybrid burial. If your family already has spaces at a cemetery, see what options are available.
• If you want visitation, find a funeral home that doesn’t require embalming, or at the very least, will use eco-fluid.
• Find a casket that suits you or your family member:
• Good: A wood casket
• Better: Green Burial Council Certified
• Best: Use a shroud
• If you must use an outer burial container, make sure you get one that doesn’t have plastic and steel reinforcement.

Just by taking a few steps, you and your family can create a legacy of stewardship. It’s likely that this post has managed to open up more questions than it has answered and hopefully it spurs you on to learn more about what’s out there for your family. This, of course, only scratches the surface of the green options out there, and I’m sure that many of you are on pins and needles wondering about cremation and its impacts, or the exotic services that a few of you have heard of like alkali hydrolysis and promession. Fear not CoolMoms, those questions and more will be answered in future posts!

 *There is a lot of jargon in our profession. The terms in the table below are the lexicon of a traditional funeral home. Like jargon in any other industry, the terms are specific so that communication can be more exact. The problems arise when terms like “funeral” mean different things to the public than they do in the funeral home.  Understanding these will help us to explore the difference between traditional and green services, and will also serve to help you in navigating end of life services.