If you’re planning a traditional Western funeral for a loved one, burial according to industry standards will cost you — in more ways than one. The materials typically used in the process, from embalming chemicals to casket varnishes and sealants, can seep into ground, polluting the water that you use every day.
In addition, U.S. cemeteries contain an estimated 15 tons of casket steel, enough to build almost all of the skyscrapers in Tokyo, according to TalkDeath, an online community dedicated to encouraging positive conversations around death and dying. Even cremation — often considered one of the most environmentally friendly options — spews fossil fuels into the atmosphere.
So what’s an eco-conscious funeral planner to do? A green burial uses biodegradable materials for caskets and shuns the use of chemicals to preserve bodies. That means adopters can help save the planet while saving themselves (or their families) money in the process.
To learn more about green burials, watch the video above.
More: Saving the Earth by Dying
Tag: death
You’re Going to Die (Eventually). Let’s Make Sure It Doesn’t Hurt the Environment
Nate Fisher’s burial scene in the HBO series “Six Feet Under” was a watershed moment in the green-burial movement: It introduced the idea of human composting to a mainstream audience, says Mark Harris, author of a book about natural burials, in a blog post on the subject. “I’ve long believed that [the episode], which aired on August 21, 2005, did more to sell the idea to the greater public than any newspaper story, newscast or magazine piece at the time,” he writes.
Yet despite such a prominent cultural marker (not to mention the myriad environmental benefits), human composting is not yet legal in any U.S. state. Over the last few years, 17 states have legalized a process called alkaline hydrolysis, also known as water cremation, where bodies are dissolved in a mix of water and lye. Alkaline hydrolysis is greener than regular cremation: While one single traditional cremation emits as much carbon dioxide as a 1,000-mile car trip, alkaline hydrolysis emits much lower rates of emissions and uses a quarter of the energy. But in most states, bodies must be buried, entombed, cremated or donated to science, which means you could be arrested for burying grandma beneath her favorite dogwood tree.
This is why a bill recently introduced to the Washington Legislature by state senator Jamie Pedersen is being watched very carefully by green burial enthusiasts. The bill — which seeks to expand the options for disposing of human remains after death, including the practice of composting human bodies — was passed in committee and may be up for a floor vote in the next few weeks, according to Chris West, Pedersen’s communications specialist.
As we’ve previously covered, green burials are becoming more popular in this country. In the U.S. in 2006, according to the Green Burial Council, there was only one council-approved provider of green burials; there are now more than 300 today, and that number is rising.
This makes sense for financial as well as environmental reasons. Traditional burials can easily cost upwards of $10,000, and embalming fluids leach toxins like formaldehyde into our soil and groundwater supplies. Space is also a major concern, especially in urban centers: in New York City, no new cemeteries have been established in over 50 years, so the cost of each individual plot is also rising.
While cremation is already viewed by many as a more environmentally friendly option than a casket-and-concrete vault, it requires an input of fossil fuels and results in the production of CO2, around “a metric ton per body,” according to Katrina Spade, whose Seattle-based public benefit corporation, Recompose, is at the forefront of the human composting movement. “Recomposition uses one-eighth the energy of cremation,” Spade says. It also saves money: Spade estimates each human composting would cost a mere $5,500.
“I started this work because I saw the funeral experience as something worth improving, and I’ve since had several deaths of loved ones really affirm that idea,” Spade says. “Decay and decomposition are amazing processes we are terrified of because they might seem icky and scary — your body aging, your food rotting — but without those processes, we would not be alive.”
If you’re a funeral traditionalist but also have our planet’s best interests at heart, the negative environmental impact of the rituals surrounding death in this country might be enough to change your mind. In the U.S., according to Grist, 30 million board feet of wood, 1.6 million tons of concrete, 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid and 90,000 tons of steel are used every year for conventional burials. Cremation releases 250,000 tons of CO2 each year, the equivalent of burning nearly 30 million gallons of gasoline.
By contrast, bodies that are cremated via composting generate about a cubic yard of compost per person, Spade says, nourishing the soil with needed minerals and other nutrients. In 2018, a team at Washington State University, led by compost science expert Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, showed that human bodies could be safely and efficiently converted to “earthy organic material.” The study used six bodies that were donated to the university for science. Carpenter-Boggs and Spade are currently working on an Urban Death prototype they anticipate to complete by 2023.
While the “ick” factor might remain, it seems attitudes around human composting are changing. In 2014, green burials only made up about five percent of funerals, and there were about 40 certified green burial grounds in the U.S. But according to a 2017 National Funeral Director Association survey, 53.8 percent of respondents indicated an interest in exploring green funeral services, and 72 percent of cemeteries are reporting an increase in demand.
“The funeral industry is a $20 billion industry,” says Spade, who was awarded an Ashoka “changemaker” fellowship in 2018. “The idea that every person can ‘own’ a piece of land for eternity, in the form of a cemetery plot… is not a sustainable model, especially for cities with space constraints.”
More: Can Americans Accept This Environmentally-Friendly Burial Method?
Correction: A previous version of this article featured outdated pricing for Recompose’s services.
Welcome to Life After Death
If you had the chance to not just see your loved ones after they die, but interact with them, would you?
The question for many researchers and neuroscientists working in the aptly coined death-tech field is not one of will we, but rather on what platform.
“Death is often viewed as the great leveller that marks the cessation of experience. But perhaps this needn’t be the case,” writes Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, a data scientist who studies machine learning and artificial intelligence. “Even if the dead can’t interact with us anymore, we can still interact with a simulation of them.”
Not terribly long ago, the concept of bringing people back — or, rather, bringing back their consciousnesses — seemed so far out of reach that it was the subject of an early episode of the futuristic sci-fi series “Black Mirror.” Fast-forward a couple of years to today, and you can find many scientists and philosophers contemplating the ethical implications of re-creating deceased humans, and what that might mean for how we grieve.
Dmitri Itzkov is a Russian multimillionaire who told the BBC in 2016 that he left the business world to “devote himself to something more useful to humanity.” His vision: A world where science has decoded the mysteries of the human mind, which then can be uploaded to a computer and transferred into a robotic avatar.
The thirtysomething Itzkov, who founded the 2045 Initiative to pursue his goal of “cybernetic immortality,” already knows how he will spend his immortal life. “For the next few centuries I envision having multiple bodies, one somewhere in space, another hologram-like, my consciousness just moving from one to another.”
It sounds outlandish, like something out of a low-budget sci-fi movie from the ’80s. But not everyone in the death-tech field is planning an endless existence involving mind-uploading and lifelike robots.
The Philadelphia-based biotech company BioQuark is currently studying how to reanimate the brains of people on life support who have been declared brain-dead. (Once the brain stem stops functioning, a person is considered to be legally deceased.) The plan is to inject stem cells and amino acids into patients’ spinal cords and brain stems, alongside other therapies, and grow neurons in the brain that will connect to each other and thus, regenerate the brain.
“This represents the first trial of its kind and another step towards the eventual reversal of death in our lifetime,” said BioQuark CEO Ira Pastor at the study’s outset.
There are other technologies cropping up that don’t bring back the dead, per se, but do allow mourners to keep their memories of loved ones alive for eternity.
A few years back city officials in Anchorage, Alaska, for example, began allowing people to stick QR codes on the city’s columbarium wall, which holds 9,000 urns. When scanned by visitors, the QR codes pull up an online memorial, photos and videos posted by the family.
“If we give people the opportunity to memorialize in a way that they’re comfortable with, then they’ll be down the road to healthy grieving, and that’s the whole point,” said Rob Jones, director of Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery.
It’s not out of the realm of possibility that robotics and the rapid evolution of technology may one day revolutionize the way humans die — or don’t die.
Until that time comes, however, the rest of us will have to make peace with our own mortality and continue honoring our dead the analog way: by keeping their memories alive inside our brains, and our hearts.
Saving the Earth By Dying
Situated just south of San Francisco, the small town of Colma, Calif., has become famous, or perhaps infamous, for its motto: “It’s Great to Be Alive in Colma.” Which is ironic, given that the town’s population of dead people far outnumbers its living residents by nearly 1,000 to one.
Among the living is Joe Stinson, 72, a funeral director and owner of Colma Cremation and Funeral Services. Over the course of his decades-long career caring for the dead, he’s seen a lot of changes the industry. The latest? A growing movement toward eco-friendly burials.
“Green burials are changing how we, as a society, look at burying our dead,” says Stinson, who believes that just as our own deaths are imminent, so too is the widespread adoption of environmentally friendly deathcare options.
In the past few years, a wave of eco-friendly startups have focused on how humans can continue to be good stewards of the earth even in our afterlife. At its core, a green, or natural, burial minimizes environmental impact by reducing carbon emissions and making sure no harmful substances leach into the ground. This can include biodegradable caskets, like those made from handwoven willow or seagrass, or simple cotton shrouds. And the use of the toxin formaldehyde to preserve a corpse is a definite no-no. After an unpreserved body is lowered into the ground, it eventually decomposes, mixing and nourishing the earth around it.
According to the Green Burial Council, which provides eco-certifications for burial practitioners and products, the number of GBC-approved providers in North America has grown from one in 2006 to more than 300 today. (To be sure, that number is certainly higher, as deathcare providers don’t have to be GBC-certified to offer green and eco-friendly options.)
The arguments for a more environmentally conscious burial are mounting, literally, as the concrete, steel and wood we bury along with our dead piles up. (According to one estimate, there’s 115 million tons of casket steel underground in North America, or enough to build almost all the high rises in Tokyo.) What’s more, the formaldehyde used in embalming is a known carcinogenic, putting funeral directors at a higher risk for cancer. Then there’s the pollutants — from embalming fluid to the toxic chemicals used in casket varnishes and sealants — that can seep into the groundwater. As for cremation, that takes an environmental toll too, as the burning of fossil fuels emits harmful carbon dioxide into the air.
“This, by no means, should be at the top of our environmental priority list, but it is something that can be easily dealt with,” says Phil Olson, associate professor at Virginia Tech who specializes in death studies. “What we need to be worried about is the crap we put in the ground with the body. We need to talk about the environmental impact of forestry and all the energy it takes to manufacture the metals in coffins.”
Most green deathcare providers are hybrid operations, offering both conventional and natural burial options, but there are a few in the U.S. that specialize solely in green funerals and burials. One such operation is Fernwood Cemetery, located in Marin County, Calif., about an hour’s drive north of Stinson’s funeral home in Colma. On any given day at the bucolic cemetery, which sits above the rolling hills above Sausalito, you’ll find people walking their dogs, riding bikes or just lounging about. The only clue that it’s a burial ground is the occasional boulder engraved with someone’s name.
“We had some people coming through who were lost and asked what park we were in,” jokes Cindy Barath, the funeral director for Fernwood.
As for costs, well, that depends on where you live — or, rather, where you die.
Anyone in the cemetery business will say that death is like buying a house; it’s all about location. And in cities such as San Francisco, where there is more space devoted to housing and mixed-use buildings, creating an affordable option for a green burial is still a ways off. Fernwood, for example, charges between $10,000 to $15,000 for a full funeral, with a large chunk of that money going toward buying a plot of land. Compare that to the national average for a traditional funeral and burial, which is about $8,500.
Still, the costs for a green burial can be significantly less than a traditional internment, since you’re not paying for body preservation, an expensive casket made of steel or exotic wood, or a concrete grave vault. And some in the green-burial movement are working toward a model where a separate plot for each grave isn’t even necessary.
In Seattle, Recompose — formerly known as the Urban Death Project — is designing a three-story human-compost facility that turns dead bodies into reusable soil. The ambitious project, started in 2014, is still years from completion. If it succeeds, though, the company plans to replicate the model all over the world.
“Things in this industry happen slowly,” says Olson, referring to the snail’s pace of getting conventional cemeteries onboard with green burials.
In this regard, both Olson and Stinson point to cremation, which was introduced in the U.S. in the late 19th century. But it wasn’t until almost a hundred years later that cremations became more popular than burials.
Stinson, for one, is ready for the sea change he believes will eventually sweep the entire industry. Noticing the uptick in people requesting greener options, he’s begun offering more eco-friendly options, such as caskets made of seagrass and biodegradable urns.
For years, Stinson says, burials have always been fairly black and white: Either you’re cremated, or you’re put into the ground.
Looks like now we’re finally seeing shades of green.
Can Americans Accept This Environmentally-Friendly Burial Method?
Katrina Spade isn’t afraid of death; in fact, the 38-year-old Seattle designer has spent the last five years of her life preparing for it.
Not that Spade has received a bad prognosis or expects an accident to happen anytime soon. But she’s been thinking about her end-of-life decisions because she feels the environment itself is on life support. Spade started seriously contemplating death while in architectural school, because her interests in urbanism and greener living seemed to conflict with our nation’s contemporary burial practices: the use of formaldehyde-based embalming fluid, thick steel and wooden caskets and crematoriums that spout carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere. Laying 2.6 million Americans to rest every year, she came to realize, is a for-profit industry that didn’t give much thought to sustainability.
In the most ambitious plan yet presented by the Green Burial movement, Spade designed a facility to compost human bodies into reusable soil. Known as the Urban Death Project, the modular building can be erected in every major metropolis, reining in demand on overcrowded urban cemeteries and providing an eco-friendly option for city-dwellers. Spade has attempted “to create a system that can take our bodies, which are — even when we die — full of potential and don’t need to be burned or buried away” and transforms them, she explains. “What I designed is not just a system that will turn bodies into soil. I actually thought about that for a while: Am I trying to do something that can be inserted into existing funeral homes, like a crematory has, and keep doing things the way we are doing now? I right away realized that’s just a piece of it.”
Spade’s expansive vision involves a new kind of facility, “a secular sacred space” which she imagines would sit on a forested city block. Its interior would resemble Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan (a nautilus-shaped spiral), but where the museum features an open rotunda at its center, Spade’s building would house a 24-foot vertical tower, inside which bodies would compost over several months. Until recently, the concept was theoretical, but Spade recently held a design session with architects, engineers and a compost expert to design a prototype that will be built in the next nine months and run by Dr. Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, a crop and soil scientist, at Washington State University in Pullman.
“The bodies we leave behind aren’t just shells of our former selves; they are full of potential – nitrogen, water, calcium and phosphorus – the building blocks of nutrient-rich soil,” Spade has written. “The truth is that without decomposition – the process by which organic material is broken down to support new growth – we would not exist at all.”
Intended to delay the decomposition process for a public viewing of the body, embalming (which fills the body with formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, and other chemicals) may cause lasting environmental harm, as chemicals eventually seep into graveyards and, potentially, groundwater supplies. (Morticians themselves are also put in harm’s way: a 2009 study found funeral workers and anatomists had a heightened risk of dying from myeloid leukemia, presumably because the repeated exposure to formaldehyde.) While less toxic, the same principle applies to the other accoutrements of funerals: between coffins and urns, we build entire cities underground that are only seen for a moment at the open graveside.
“The typical 10-acre swath of cemetery ground,” writes Mark Harris in his 2008 book “Grave Matters,” “contains enough coffin wood to construct more than 40 homes, nine hundred-plus tons of casket steel, and another twenty thousand tons of vault concrete. To that add a volume of embalming fluid sufficient to fill a small backyard swimming pool and untold gallons of pesticide and weed killer to keep the graveyard preternaturally green. Like the contents of any landfill, the embalmed body’s toxic cache escapes its host and eventually leaches into the environment, tainting surrounding soil and groundwaters. Cemeteries bear the chemical legacy of their embalmed dead, and well after their graves have been closed.”
Spade first stumbled onto the environmental damage inflicted by the funeral industry during grad school, as she tried to answer a simple question: “What happens to my body after I die?” Around the same time, almost by chance, a friend called her up and asked her if she knew that ranchers composted entire cattle carcasses, which had died due to age, weather or certain diseases. A native of rural New Hampshire who’s now a committed urbanite, Spade’s innovation involved modifying that agricultural process into a way to dispose of bodies in the cramped landscape of a city. (She, of course, plans to use the process once it’s completed, although she adds, “I think once I’m dead, I really won’t care.”)
Working with a team at Western Carolina University, Spade and the researchers are currently testing the composting process outdoors with five human cadavers. They want to figure out which materials (like wood chips) speed up the decomposition process. Spade compares the process to lighting a fire in a wood stove: one needs to figure out the right amount of kindling, logs and oxygen to achieve the greatest heat. (Like the fire, decomposition rates are also measured by temperature: more heat is a sign of microbial activity.) If conditions are right, after six weeks, she expects the bodies will be fully composted.
For most, it takes a mental leap to agree and swallow the implications of the Urban Death Project. Spade, however, takes comfort in that admission, believing there’s new potential to be unleashed through a person’s final choice. “During the process, we cease to be human. I mean scientifically, we cease to be human. So what’s being created is not remains: it’s not ashes (which are actually often bone fragments, crushed up, and some ash); it’s not the bones in a casket. We move on from being human into a part of the natural ecosystem,” Spade says. “I find that both to be kinda magical and comforting to me.”
That belief helped her through a personal loss two years ago, when her maternal grandmother passed away at age 92. With family gathered around her bedside, Spades’s grandmother appeared to be drifting off to sleep. At one point, Spade recalls, she opened her eyes and asked, “What do I need to do to make this happen?” Some family members laughed. They squeezed her hand and told her, “You’re doing the right thing.” Nobody knew what came next for her grandmother, but Spade believes it’s such an intimate part of being human that we shouldn’t be frightened by its eventual arrival. “It was kind of miraculous,” she says. “Time really slowed down for those days [at her deathbed]. All we were doing was waiting for this huge, unknown thing to happen. It’s a little like being in labor, honestly. You don’t care about what’s going on in the outside world, because everything is focused on this transition.”
She continues, “I want people to know that there’s a lot of potential for us, as living people, to kind of gain from being close to the event of death. That’s one thing that the Urban Death Project is trying to do: give us a closer, more nuanced understanding of that event.”
Spade knows full well that not everyone will agree with her, and she doesn’t waste any breath trying to convince anyone to sign up. Once the prototype testing is underway, Spade expects more people will join the growing movement.
Increased interest wouldn’t be surprising, considering Americans have altered our burial practices before. Modern cremation chambers were slow to catch on, yet today, more than half of the dead are cremated. Presumably, we, as a society, can overcome any revulsion to the idea of being composted and will wake up to the environmental benefits it holds. From dust we were created, the Biblical passage goes — but with Spade’s plan, unto dirt we will return.
Can a Safety Net Underneath the Golden Gate Bridge Save Lives?
It’s an iconic image for San Francisco, and arguably for the entire state of California, but the Golden Gate Bridge is also a magnet for suicides. Suspended 220 feet over the channel that connects the San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean, its allure as a deadly jumping-off point has had people begging for a suicide barrier for 60 years.
This year, those pleas reached a fever pitch. A record 46 people jumped to their deaths from the bridge in 2013, and another 118 were stopped before they could. These numbers give the Golden Gate Bridge the dubious distinction as one of the most popular suicide destinations in the world, along with the Eiffel Tower and the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Unlike those international landmarks, the Golden Gate’s orange-red span lacks a suicide barrier. But as soon as this May, that could change. The New York Times reported this week that directors of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District are expected to approve construction of a steel mesh net 20 feet below the California landmark’s sidewalk.
So what finally changed San Francisco’s trademark “live and let live” philosophy (which so well applies to other aspects of city life) this year? For one, suicides off the Golden Gate Bridge are trending younger. That means there are more parents taking up arms against the bridge’s seemingly easy exit strategy. For another, the numbers just keep growing: The Bridge Rail Foundation, an advocacy group that publicizes annual bridge statistics and encourages a growing number of bereaved parents to tell their stories, counts 1,600 suicides since the bridge was built in 1937.
These days, there is a suicide or an attempt almost every other day off of the bridge. As advocacy groups like the Bridge Rail Foundation made their case more and more clear, the city finally took note. And their actions will likely have a positive impact. While critics of the plan point out that suicidal people will find another way to die if a mesh net foils their attempt, many experts note that suicidal impulses are usually ephemeral. The obstacle of a net may be just enough to change their minds.
“Scientific evidence says a barrier reduces suicides, because thoughts of suicide are transient,” Eve R. Meyer, executive director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention, told the Times. For years, she said, when she raised the issue of a barrier before the board, she was shunned. Now, her voice is finally being heard.
And as for those that worry a net or barrier will mar the bridge’s beauty, those concerns will likely be unfounded. According to the recent designs, the barrier will be invisible from most angles.