Funeral Planning – Eco-friendly caskets and urns the latest in green funerals

Funeral Planning with Eco-friendly caskets

From recycled newspaper coffins that resemble space-age mummies to sea-salt urns that dissolve in hours if floated out to sea, green burial options will be among the most innovative products on the trade-show floor at the National Funeral Directors Association convention in New Orleans this week.

“It allows families to do something a little bit more meaningful with their last acts,” says Darren Crouch, president of Passages International, a company from Albuquerque, New Mexico, that specializes in eco-friendly funeral products for humans and pets.

“More and more people over the years, here and in Canada, have rejected traditional funerals. They don’t want the funerals they saw their parents and grandparents have.”

A key component of a green funeral is placing the body or cremated remains in a biodegradable container that will break down quickly without doing harm to the earth around it, he says. Crouch’s company sells wicker-like woven caskets made out of willow, bamboo and seagrass, along with urns made of rock salt, cornstarch, recycled paper and sand and gelatin.

The company also sells biodegradable urns and caskets for pets.

The Natural Burial Company of Eugene, Oregon, sells sleek, handmade recycled-paper Ecopod coffins in bright blue, red, green, white or metallic gold. The coffins, made by U.K.-based ARKA Ecopod Inc., can be screen-printed with images of doves, Aztec sun designs or Celtic crosses, and there’s an option to line the interior with red, white, cream or pale blue feathers.

“I like to say it’s the last thing you want to be seen in,” says general manager Cynthia Beal, laughing.

“The coffin is a package. It’s biodegradable packaging that makes it easy to handle us once we’ve died and we can be handled respectfully, we can be put in something beautiful. We can go back into the earth and return to the elements our bodies were made from in the beginning. It’s a complete circle.”

Canadian funeral homes lag slightly behind their U.S. counterparts in terms of green burial options, but she says interest is growing in Canada. David Garvie, general manager of Ogden Funeral Home in Scarborough, Ont., has been stocking woven coffins from Beal’s company for the past year and a half, and he says that while there’s been plenty of “talk interest” — particularly from younger adults — he has yet to sell one of the eco-friendly vessels.

“I said to my staff, ‘Look, we’re going to be on the cutting edge and presenting some concepts that are ahead of their time,’ but I’d rather the funeral home be on that cutting edge and being prepared, rather than catching up,” he says.

While interest in green funeral options is growing rapidly — Crouch says his business has swelled 30 per cent a year since his company was founded in 1999 — funeral directors say this trend is really a throwback to centuries past.

“What we’ve done as a business has always been of a green nature: burying the dead, returning them to the earth. This isn’t anything new; we’ve been doing it for millions of years,” says James Olson, funeral director and owner of the Lippert-Olson Funeral Home in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. “What we’re doing is kind of just going back to some simpler ways, the way we used to do it.”

Olson is a spokesman and resident expert on green funeral options for the National Funeral Directors Association, which represents 19,000 individual members from more than 10,200 funeral homes in the U.S., Canada and internationally. On Tuesday at the convention, he’ll present a seminar entitled, It IS Easy Being Green.

The simplest type of green funeral is simply wrapping a body in a shroud and placing it in the ground without any embalming, casket or burial vault encasing the casket, he says — a practice with a long historical precedent that’s still prominent in some cultures. Families might opt for embalming with formaldehyde-free products that are more and more widely available, he says, or they might choose a vault that allows earth to seep in, a biodegradable casket or any other combination of elements.

“Funeral directors are going to do whatever a family wants, as long as it’s possible – or legal, I should say,” Olson says. “That’s our goal and what we do – as service providers to families in a time of need, we’re there to fulfil their requests to make a meaningful funeral for their loved one.”

Most cemeteries don’t allow “direct burials” in which a body is simply interred in the ground, he says, primarily because the ground may sink as graves settle without a burial vault to provide structure. However, he says, there are a handful of “conservation cemeteries” popping up in the U.S., where shallow direct-burial graves are dug by hand and GPS co-ordinates take the place of grave-markers that would mar the landscape.

And some traditional cemeteries are starting to offer small green sections, where more flexible earth-friendly options are available, Olson adds.

“You listen to a eulogy and it strives to recap the highlights of a person’s life,” says Beal. “One of the most important things a person can express in their life are their values, and the value of caring for the world you lived in and leaving a mark of respect as you travel through your life is something that gets carried through even at the final moment.”

BioCremation in Europe

Biocremation is a relatively new idea. There have been many articles published on the web and in the news that suggest Alkaline Hydrolysis also being referred to as Biocremation has been used for a while for human disposition. I have not found anything that suggests that it has been used for anything other than a way to process animal carcases. Remember the mad cow epidemic in Britain in the 1990′s? Thats how they disposed of the millions of cows.

From The Times Online – They didn’t have this kind of problem in Ancient Egypt. As Britain prepares to queue to see the spectacular tomb treasures of the boy king Tutankhamun in London next week, a less heavily publicised funerary gathering will convene in less mysterious and romantic circumstances – in Gateshead.

Our burial and cremation bosses are meeting for their annual conference to discuss a delicate and increasingly urgent question: what to do with all our dead bodies.

Mummification, the arcane craft of preserving defunct Pharaohs, won’t be on the agenda. But an equally odd-sounding approach will: a way of dissolving humans that was developed for disposing of diseased cattle. Technology may take us from Cairo to cows.

We are in dire need of answers. Traditional burials are in trouble because Britain is rapidly running out of cemetery land. In Greater London, half the graveyards are full and the remaining capacity is disappearing at a rate of 10,000 new interments a year. Crematoriums, meanwhile, face mounting criticism for their high energy consumption and harmful emissions. By law they must halve the amount of mercury they funnel skywards by 2012. At the moment 16 per cent of the country’s mercury emissions come from dead people’s vaporised dentistry. Expensive “scrubbing” equipment is needed for the chimneys, but not all crematoriums can accommodate it.

The body is dissolved in an alkali solution

New technology may provide radical alternatives. The front-runner under discussion at the Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities’ (FBCA) conference is called “resomation”. In layman’s terms, it is an accelerated form of natural decomposition. The body is immersed in an alkali solution of potash lye, which is heated to about 160C in a pressurised submarine-shaped steel chamber. Two hours later, you have a watery solution that can be safely poured into the earth – and white calcium phosphate, the bone residue, that can be given to mourners like cremation ash. Dental mercury is filtered out. “Scientifically, the process involved is called alkaline hydrolysis,” explains Sandy Sullivan, an affable Scot who is pioneering the technique in Britain. “When human tissues are built, elements get bound together by the removal of water molecules. Hydrolysis puts the water back in – and unzips the tissue molecules.” Sullivan, the managing director of Resomation, the company behind the technique, is presenting his work to the conference jointly with the prestigious US Mayo Clinic, which has been using it for 18 months to deal with the remains of people who donated their bodies to medical research. “For the past decade it has been used in Florida for the batch disposal of the remains of bodies donated for research. Mayo has adopted the same process but in a more mourner-friendly manner – one body at a time, with the body entering the chamber horizontally, just like cremation,” says Sullivan.

The basic process has been used with animals since the early 1990s. Sullivan originally worked with a company that developed it for cows that had BSE or had been used for anthrax or smallpox vaccines, as it sterilises as well as decomposes. Now he says his machine is attracting interest and putative orders from America, Canada and “three or four places in Britain”.

For the ceremony, the body is placed in a reusable casket that resembles a traditional coffin. This covers an inner coffin made of silk on a metal frame. This liner is put into the chamber and the silk dissolves. “The majority of the Resomators will be installed alongside cremators as an eco-friendly alternative method,” says Sullivan.

The City of London Crematorium is interested in the technology. Dr Ian Hussain, its director, says: “I’d take one tomorrow. It seems a great invention, but first it must be approved by our board members. One snag is that the funeral directors might be unhappy about not being able to sell mourners coffins.” Duncan McCallum, the secretary of the FBCA, agrees that resomation sounds promising. “It isn’t releasing emissions into the air and it’s not doing the same damage as a burial. It seems to have a lot going for it.”

Funeral Plans – Green Cremation Urns

This video demonstrates a green cremation urn. Even though the contents were processed in the usual way the urn is made of a dissolving material. There is a bag that holds the cremains intact while the outer container dissolves. After about 3 days the biodegradable bag also dissolves. At sea burials come to mind. If there was a way to get around the standard cremation process in North America it would be ideal.

Bio-cremation called eco-friendly- Calif. seeks approval

Green Funerals: eco-friendly funerals gain popularity in Sweden

Green Funerals – Popular in Sweden

Green funerals are becoming more popular. The term “green funeral” Can have various meanings depending on the country and the religion or tradition. This particular style of green funeral uses liquid nitrogen to break down the body and then freeze dries the remains which can then be used for fertilizer.  I like this, I could come back as flowers or herbs, or maybe as trees.

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