Filed under: Energy + Climate, Nature + Travel, Society + Media, Waste + Recycling | Tags: burials, caskets, cemetaries, cremation, embalming, funerals, green burial council, green burials, green funerals
I’ve never found extravagant and energy-consuming funerals necessary. I thought that if being eco-friendly when alive was so important, why wouldn’t it be just as important after death?
But now, funerals don’t need to be as harmful to the environment. Environmentalists are choosing to go an eco-friendly route after they die, and Lawrence is said to have acquired the first Kansas cemetary to conduct “green” burials.
“Green” burial sites and biodegradable caskets are part of the new wave of environmentally friendly ways to leave behind your corpse. What makes a “green” burial site? According to the Green Burial Council, it includes, at the least, cemetaries that offer burials without vaults or embalming, and the use of eco-friendly burial containers.
Embalming fluids, which are used to keep bodies in tip-top shape for funerals, contain formaldehyde, methanol and ethanol, which are known to be harmful to human health and may cause cancer. About 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid are buried in the United States each year.
Eco-friendly caskets include those made of bamboo, local lumber or cardboard.
There’s also another alternative — cremation. Slate believes cremation can be more eco-friendly than even the “greenest” of burials, despite a cremation’s four-times-as-much disposal of CO2, because cremation is a single-time operation and burial plots require ongoing care.
Either way you go, take solace in knowing that the grass can be greener on the other side.
— Jessica Sain-Baird
Thanks to seto_supraenergy for the image.
