The Magazine of The Sierra Club
How to Be Green to the Grave
The bad news: You're dead. The good news: You can bring your green convictions with you when you go. Click through the slideshow to see how you can buck the industrialization of death.
Warm up to your impending demise by installing WILLIAM WARREN’s Shelves for Life in your living room. Based on your height and weight, the U.K. designer makes and sends you drawings with instructions on how to build your own shelves and later fashion them into caskets. Instructions are free.
If you’re a tree hugger who wants the last laugh, consider the SPÍRITREE biodegradable urn. Shaped like an egg with a hole punched through it, the urn has an organic bottom shell that fits over a seedling, which feeds on the container and your ashes as it grows. The urn’s porous ceramic top lets water in and eventually shatters and disintegrates as the encased seedling grows. For best results, pair your remains with a native tree species. $225
You love the ocean and don't want to become one of the "shelf people"—the death-industry term for cremains stored on mantels or stashed in closets. Instead, have a loved one send you off in a Salt Urn from PASSAGES, which biodegrades in water within four hours. Just be sure they follow EPA regulations and place the urn at least three nautical miles from shore. Prices vary
Photo by Lori Eanes
Pumping the deceased with formaldehyde, tucking them into pricey metal caskets, and plunking them into a concrete-lined grave has become the American way of dealing with the dead.
Of course, there is a countermovement. Alternatives to traditional burial range from cremating our beloved’s remains and scattering them to simply burying Gran in a dirt hole.
“People who are recycling grocery bags and composting and doing what they can to take care of the planet don’t want their dispositions to unnecessarily pollute or impact the environment,” says Green Burial Council founder Joe Sehee.
The council rates green burial sites throughout the country, including hybrid burial grounds—cemeteries that allot part of their grounds for burying bodies in unlined graves—and natural burial grounds, where graves are unlined and burial containers are made from natural or nontoxic materials.
For the ultimate environmentalist, Sehee’s even working on helping national parks preserve bordering lands as green burial sites.
“In its truest form, green burial is a naturalized landscape where there wouldn’t even be markings—not a stone, not a plant,” says Suzette Sherman, founder and CEO of Seven Ponds, which promotes a healthy attitude toward death. “You just wrap the body and dig a hole. There are no liners, so you’re literally letting the body go back to the earth.”
Alas, there’s no perfect way to go. Sherman points out that toxins stored in the body’s fat and tissue can leach into the ground. Still, the idea of making ecofriendly final arrangements is catching on slowly.
“People don’t like to think they’re going to die,” says Esmerelda Kent Kinkaraco, the founder of a green burial company. She made costumes for aerialists before making shrouds with handles for hoisting a body into a grave. “It’s not a fun, cool thing. It’s death.”
