CO Firm Offers Eco-Friendly Burial Thru Biodegradable Caskets

Um...don't all caskets decompose? Aside from concrete, of course.

Most aren't made of wood. Most are metal. Mine is lob-lolly pine, finished in cherrywood stain and high-gloss polyurethane. I spent $200 on it, and most of that was for tools that I wanted for the garage (honey-do fakeout at Home Depot).

I store HF antennas in it until I actually need it.

Texas is a "Bury them in the box they brought" state. No regs.

/johnny

None now, but surprises may await you in your dotage.

Probably won’t sell in most places due to ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS... your decaying carcas is a biohazard in many states. If that were the case a great casket would be a Cardboard box... I’m DEAD I DON”T CARE what I’m buried in.

Ecoffins, not to be confused with the tiny P.C. automobiles the Obama Green AutoNazis will be making you drive.

I guess the Pyramids are out of the question.

***Texas is a "Bury them in the box they brought" state. No regs.***

I love that idea...All this ten thousands dollars to bury someone is nuts...I had a friend that said" just dump me in the septic tank, good bacteria.."

Soylent Green and now this. I feel like we've gone back to the late 50s, early 60s.

Um. I'll be dead. Surprises go to the estate. I'll be cool with it. Or at least room temp.

/johnny

your decaying carcas is a biohazard in many states

My living one is a declared hazard in at least 3.

/johnny

There are a number of Roman Catholic Monasteries that make and sell simple caskets/coffins. My husband and I plan to purchase ours from one of them. Sort of two birds with one stone, we get a coffin and the monks get monetary support.

http://www.trappistcaskets.com/

http://www.monasterycaskets.com/

http://www.abbeycaskets.com/index.asp

http://www.sjawood.org/main/3/funerary.php

Green funerals are becoming an inexpensive way to bury the dead. So many states have regs that would prevent this however.

The following would make a great Monty Python episode...

Why dad's eco-funeral went horribly wrong

My father was buried in a cardboard coffin and placed next to a pet cemetery miles from our family home. Read about the 'green' funeral that went horribly wrong:

As his final statement, a 'green' burial seemed the perfect way for my father to take his leave of planet Earth.

Not only would it avoid rare tropical hardwoods being felled and carted halfway around the world for a coffin that would be seen for only a few hours, but the burial would cost fraction of the amount of a more conventional send-off - which was particularly pleasing for a man who would re-use every Styrofoam cup and piece of string.

My mother had booked plots for my father and herself by phone with a Somerset-based green undertakers after reading a newspaper article about eco-burials several years ago.

At the time, there were only a handful of green burial sites in the country. Today, there are around 200, and you can choose from seven different models of cardboard coffins, costing around £55 including overnight delivery.

If cardboard's not your style, you could be buried in a bamboo casket, a moss-lined woven willow nest or even a sack. The service can range from nothing at all - the simple deposition of a shroud-clad corpse into the earth - to the full religious works with horse-drawn hearses, music and a priest. (While sites are rarely consecrated, a priest can bless an individual plot.)

Once my mother had paid, we didn't really discuss it further. I preferred to put the whole thing out of my mind and, in any case, it hardly seemed urgent.

It wasn't until my father, a lifelong smoker, died of emphysema in 2004 and I decided to take charge of arrangements, that I realised we didn't even know where the burial site was, except that it was somewhere near our home in Cornwall.

The number of green burial sites nationwide may have mushroomed, but they are still far from mainstream, and so the green undertaking firms servicing them often cover large areas.

The staff at the company we used were friendly and supportive, but the fact they were based in Somerset, two counties east of us, meant we had to make many of the arrangements ourselves.

There are no binding regulations governing green burial sites - after what we experienced, I've come to the conclusion someone should do something about that.

Sobbing uncontrollably

I hadn't anticipated, for example, having to ring the gravedigger while my father was still alive (just), so that the man would be able to dig the hole in time. I was sobbing so uncontrollably that I had to call back three times.

For a couple of hundred pounds, I suppose we should not have expected the tailormade 'death care services' of TV's comedy series Six Feet Under, but I was definitely starting to wish I had found out more about what to expect before we got to this stage.

While some people actively choose to make their relative's death even more Do-It-Yourself than ours - washing and laying out the body at home, for example - I was glad that we had not gone so far down this path.

I had previously thought being 'numb with grief' was a cliché, but I found it hard even to remember the undertaker's simple instructions about, for example, what certificates to collect and where to take them.

After he died, my father was taken to the local funeral parlour, where he received all the normal treatment except for the environmentally unfriendly embalming process.

However, we had not realised - with hindsight, perhaps naively - that this also meant we would be unable to visit my body in a chapel of rest, as an unembalmed body cannot legally be put on view. So he lay in a freezer in a funeral parlour on an industrial estate.

Cardboard coffin

A couple of lovely men from the Somerset undertakers met us at the funeral parlour on the day of my father's burial four days later, having already transferred his body to its white cardboard coffin. It only briefly crossed my mind that it looked a little like some kind of IKEA flat pack.

My uncle had gone to view the burial site a few days earlier and found a bungalow surrounded by decaying motorbikes and children's toys. We had been seized by dread that my dad was going to be buried under this garden detritus.

Thankfully, the bungalow turned out to be the proprietor's home, and the graveyard itself was on a nearby hillside overlooking a beautiful wooded valley.

We had chosen to carry my father's coffin ourselves - it seemed like a final service we could perform for him, much more personal and fitting than asking the men from the undertaker's do it.

Pet cemetery

However, what we did not expect was that half the site would be given over to a pet cemetery. It was rather surreal to read signs such as 'Cassie, a brave pony' as we carried the coffin past.

My mother and I, both animal lovers, didn't mind, but my brother found this shockingly disrespectful to the human dead.

We were at last able to see Dad again when his coffin was opened at the graveside for a final goodbye.

As requested, the local undertakers had dressed him in his favourite clothes, false teeth and laid him on the fleecy dressing gown he'd worn so much towards the end of his life.

For a 'service' we kept things simple and personal and free from religion - we held a proper memorial service a month later in home village.

Another thing we all liked about green burials was that, instead of an impersonal marble headstone, a tree would be planted on my dad's grave, converting the nutrients from his remains into new life in a site that would eventually revert to woodland, providing food and shelter for wildlife.

We were told we had to wait for the soil to settle, and so it wasn't until a few months later that we came back to the site to plant our rowan sapling, having first called the proprietor and arranged for him to have a hole dug ready on the grave site.

After a 45-minute drive, we arrived to find no hole and no owner. After frantically and fruitlessly trying all the phone numbers on the sign outside his deserted house, I finally made contact with the apparently unapologetic owner, who said he would send his son.

After a half-hour wait in the drizzle, the shovel-bearing son arrived. Together we tramped up to the cemetery - whereupon a terrible realisation dawned; none of us could remember where my father was buried.

The boy called his father, who said my dad was in Row One, Plot 16. Around 30 people had already been buried in the site.

Although some of these plots had trees growing on them (many of them ornamental garden ones - not the indigenous woodland species that I'd expected), others, like my father's, still had yet to be marked in any obvious way.

It was therefore hard to tell where one stopped and the next started. So we all started to pace the distance out, like pirates searching for buried treasure on a desert island. Eventually, the owner's son decided on my father's whereabouts, and started to dig.

A foot down, when he hit solid slate, he became rather less sure. 'I normally only do the pets,' he beamed, by way of explanation.

Soaked, tired, and with my grizzling baby and elderly mother in tow, it seemed churlish to kick up a fuss.

And so he dug a hole and we planted a tree, not totally sure whether it was actually on my father's grave, on someone else's grave or in a patch of undisturbed field.

Legally, graveyard plots must be identifiable for the burial register, and I am sure the owner himself would have been able to tell us which plot was my father's - had he actually done as we asked.

We now assume, as no one has ever asked us to move it from their relative's grave, that our tree is in the right place. But it would be nice not to be left with niggling doubts.

Luckily, my father was a very unconventional character, and I'm sure he would have seen the funny side.

My mother was less amused, but she didn't complain because she was worried the owner wouldn't look after the tree we had planted. Her fears were apparently confirmed the next time we returned.

It was looking in very poor shape and ants had obviously nested in the roots, though a year later it has now rallied.

Nonetheless, she still has no regrets about being buried in the same place as my father. "I'm not going to be around to worry about it," she explained. "I'll be happy as long as I'm buried and a tree is planted."

I, too, still think green burials are a good idea and would like one for myself. However, I would definitely visit the site first, and get recommendations from other families about the site and its proprietor.

Like most people, I suppose, we didn't want to think too much about the death process until it became unavoidable.

However, having chosen to operate in somewhat uncharted territory, we probably should have done.

Though we can now laugh at most of the 'lapses' we experienced, for other bereaved people these could have been utterly devastating.

Guardian Newspapers Ltd 2006

Considering the support I give Trappist monks by purchasing their ale, I would have gone that route, if I hadn't made my own.

Port Salut cheese, Tripple, baguette, and coffin. What more does a man need for this life and preparation for the next?

/johnny

Some time ago, we had a thread about a deceased British WWII pilot and the cardboard coffin their family made for his *send-off* ...some people were outraged. I thought it was charming.

lol Being a woman I vote for chocolate instead of ale. The good monks make fudge and fruitcakes too. They’re busy men. If you look at the first link, they make all sorts of things!

http://www.monasterygreetings.com/Products.asp?PCID=11

http://www.gethsemanifarms.org/

http://www.trappist.net/commerce/fudge_fruitcake.htm

Oh, good grief!! What!!! Like those little peat moss cups that plants come in? THIS IS GETTING WAY BEYOND STUPID!!! All these “greenies” can stick my carbon footprint up their kumbaya! Sideways at that!! And if they get to close to me I’ll like to fry theirs with my pink stun gun! Or just delete it with the loaded 38 Detective Special I keep in my car!! Yes, the Cadillac CTS with the big gas guzzling engine!!!! (And I do fill up with mid-grade!)

I’m with you goat granny. I’m a simple girl. I want something simple and cheap. This would fit the bill either that or cremation.

LOL :)

That’s a neat idea. I plan on cremation, myself...after they use whatever is still usable on & in my carcass. :)

My Mom is donating her body to a local teaching hospital. She’s a retired X-Ray Tech and her favorite part of school (she went back when she was 42) were the autopsies. She loved working ER.

I changed my mind. I want to be buried in a fudge coffin, LOL!