Green Funerals 101

The publication of our book Living Consciously, Dying Gracefully, has opened the world of green funerals to us. Although our book doesn’t advocate for green funerals, it depicts our sister-in-law's home death, the decision not to embalm, a family-arranged cremation, and a family-directed wake and funeral.

A green funeral is one in which no embalming takes place and a body is buried without any toxic material being introduced to the earth, such as that found in standard metal and hardwood coffins, concrete burial vaults, and marble headstones. A whole movement has sprung up in the past decade that advocates an environmentally friendly way of handling people’s remains.

Becky and I have become more and more interested in eco-burial for ourselves, although at this point she would prefer some type of cremation—for herself and for me. Luckily, an alternative to clame-based fossil-fuel intensive cremation now is available in Minnesota.

One of the best, most comprehensive articles I’ve read on environmentally-friendly funerals was a 2008 piece in Cincinnati CityBeat. It included interviews with mourners, ministers, and funeral directors. The journalist even considers the circumstances of gay and lesbian couples, something I haven’t seen in other reports on green funerals.

I’ve quoted two paragraphs below to give a taste. The second paragraph echoes my brother Bill Manahan's foreword in Living Consciously, Dying Gracefully: A Journey with Cancer and Beyond.

“Die the Way You Live: Befriending Death and Planning for the Inevitable” by Stephen Carter-Novotni

When local chiropractor Pamela Tickel´s husband Will passed away in 2006, she was convinced that he should be laid to rest in a way that honored their commitment to the environment and a natural lifestyle. Will, also a chiropractor, was buried without embalming or a vault at Ramsey Creek preserve in South Carolina, one of just a handful of green burial grounds in the U.S.

“When we had a home birth 25 years ago, people thought we were crazy, and now people are very accepting and interested,” Pamela says, explaining that even though green burial is foreign to most, her paradigm has shifted and contemporary burial practices seem odd to her now.

Nancy

5 Tips for Going Out Green

You recycle. You replace conventional light bulbs with energy-saving bulbs. You turn down the heat and avoid using air conditioning. You buy local, organic produce. You walk or bike, and you may even own a fuel-efficient car.

But have you considered the carbon footprint of your final act on earth? As in your funeral?

Conventional funeral practices are not usually “green.” Embalming fluids, hardwood and metal caskets, concrete vaults, and the gasoline, pesticides, and herbicides required to maintain a traditional cemetery are not environmentally-friendly. In addition to being better for the environment, green funerals usually cost much less than “traditional” funerals.

Green cemeteries have opened in the UK and Europe, with the US starting to follow suit. Click here for a list. If you live far one of the few natural burial grounds in this country, you still can minimize the environmental impact of your final leave-taking if you follow these tips.

1. AVOID EMBALMING. Let your body return to the earth naturally, without toxic chemicals.

2. AVOID METAL OR HARDWOOD CASKETS. Cooperate, instead of interfering with, the natural process of decomposition. Choose a pine, bamboo, jute, or cardboard casket, or simply have a shroud.

3. AVOID concrete gave liners (vaults). They’re not required by law. They are simply standard practice in conventional cemeteries.

4. If there is no conservation cemetery nearby, ask your local cemeteries about a natural burial area. Many are designating space to meet the growing demand for green burials.

5. If natural burial is not feasible, choose cremation. Although burning requires fossil fuels and may release mercury and other toxic chemicals into the environment, cremation is much greener than conventional embalming and burial practices.

You can also investigate a new technology: Resomation. This is an alkaline hydrolysis process that takes about the same time as cremation but uses less energy, produces less CO2, and avoids putting mercury and other contaminants into the atmosphere. It returns the body to its organic components, leaving only a white ash and nutrient-rich water, which could fertilize a memorial tree. Resomation is currently offered in only a few places in North America, including the Mayo Medical School's body-donor program in Minnesota.

No matter which way you want to go, those who will make decisions for you should know your final wishes. Put your instructions in writing. Discuss them with your family and friends. A funeral directive can be part of your Health Care Directive, which we all should have. There are free downloadable forms on line. One that we like, “Five Wishes,” is comprehensive and walks step by step through excellent questions. It’s available here.

So the next time you take out the newspapers and cans, imagine how you want to conduct your final act of recycling. Act now so that, when the time comes, you can Go Out Green.

For more information about green burial, see the New York Times article “Home Burials Offer an Intimate Alternative,” read Grave Matters by Mark Harris, or read Going Out Green by Bob Butz.

Green Funerals: Old Peruvian Style versus New Mayo Clinic Style

Lima, Peru's underground catacomb human bone pits 

We are spending a week in Lima, Peru visiting Nancy's brother Jim Manahan, who is on assignment here for four months.

We’ve made the rounds of several museums and historic sites including the Church of San Francisco built in 1674. This church is famous for its vast underground catacombs containing the bones of 75,000 people.

In this first cemetery of colonial Lima, bodies were laid in pits and covered with quicklime to hasten decomposition. We walked past boxes with femurs organized in herringbone patterns and deep pits with thousands of bones and skulls artistically arranged. Hundreds of skulls are stacked on shelves cut into the earthen walls.

Another museum in Lima contains twenty-five-hundred-year-old mummies from the pre-Inca era. Given the arid Peruvian climate, mummifying was a perfect way to preserve bodies. Both the catacombs and the mummies are precursors to the modern concept of green funerals. (See our earlier blog, "Green Funerals 101.")

All this put us in a receptive frame of mind for an article we discovered in London’s prestigious newspaper, The Guardian. “What Really Happens When You Die?” features interviews with six professionals who handle corpses. They detail the procedures of autopsying, embalming, burying, and cremating a body--the modern ways of death.

Resomation unit, Whole Body Donor Program, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN

The most interesting part of the article is a description of an environmentally-friendly alternative to conventional burial or cremation: resomation. According to Dean Fisher, the Director of the Mayo Clinic’s Body Donation Program, this new technique uses “water, potassium hydroxide and steam heat to dissolve the body.” What’s left at the end of the process is “nitrogen, phosphate, proteins, amino acids, salts and sugars,” the basic elements that comprise our bodies. Fisher says that this “innocuous fluid” can be “safely disposed of or used on land as a fertilizer”! The remaining bones are pulverized, as in cremation. There are no toxic emissions like mercury released into the atmosphere.

I had a long talk with Dean Fisher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. A strong proponent of resomation, he seemed quite proud of his unit . This method of final disposition is not used outside of Mayo's whole body donor program and some veterinary medicine schools. Fisher did not seem optimistic that resomation would be widely available any time soon, noting that “There are only a few resomation chambers in operation in the world.”

Nevertheless, this environmentally-friendly method of dealing with our bodies might be the wave of the future. For more information about this greener alternative to cremation and burial, visit Resomation Ltd.

Hundreds of years from now, tourists may pay to tour American museums formerly known as cemeteries!