Deep Dive: Why green funerals are on the rise

Interviewees:  
Lauren Carroll, death worker from Colorado
Elena Slominski, PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine, in the school of Social Ecology
 
Listen and subscribe to Living Planet wherever you get your podcasts: https://pod.link/livingplanet Got a question for us? Email [email protected]. And, if you like the show, leave us a rating and review on whichever podcast platform you use – and tell a friend!
 
Transcript:
Lauren: It’s such a taboo topic, which it shouldn’t be at all. I mean, we talk about sex all the time and it’s all over the place. And that’s not taboo as death. I mean, death is going to happen. It is so much part of our life in so many ways.
Lauren Carroll calls herself a death worker… and she knows exactly how she wants to go out when her time is up.
Lauren: In my dream, I die in Southern California, outside surrounded by begonias and Jasmine with the sun on my face.
She doesn’t want to be taken away in a hearse, or embalmed in a funeral home. Or burned in a crematorium.
Lauren: I do want a home funeral where my body is just laid out on my bed.
Her body will be kept in her house – on ice for a few days – so that her friends and family can take their time saying a proper goodbye.
Lauren: People can come out, hang out with me, say the things that they need to say.
I personally want to be shrouded in something biodegradable, most likely a silk shroud… I would like to be shrouded and buried at a natural burial preserve.
So the body can break down and actually feed the soil, rejuvenate the land.
There’s nothing toxic that’s going into the earth…  So that’s my personal choice.
What she’s describing is pretty unique as far as funerals in the US go.
That’s because most Americans are either cremated… OR buried in a casket six-feet under.
But both of these death practices have ecological downsides – contributing to climate change and polluting the environment.
Lauren: Guess what? There’s these other options that are regenerative and actually helpful. Which would you choose?
Lauren’s had a long time to think about this. Over the last 20 years she’s worked as a funeral director, death doula, home funeral guide, and death educator. And she’s on a mission to shake up the way we do funerals. She wants to open people’s eyes to the impact of their final footprint on earth.
I’m Neil King. This is Living Planet.
Lauren: I grew up really normal childhood in Southern California…
Lauren’s fascination with death and ghosts started at a young age
Lauren: And I was always into like, superstitions and ghost stories. And we would take long car rides. And I remember just having like, old ghost stories and I would just read all of them. And I absolutely loved it.
But that all changed when she was 13.
Her first real-life encounter with death hit her like a freight train.
Lauren: I was actually the one who answered the phone call.
And I could hear in my grandma’s voice that something was wrong, but she didn’t want to tell me. She just asked for my mom. And I knew my mom was in the shower, so she said let me talk to your dad.
And I immediately gave the phone to my dad and went into the garage and sat in the minivan because I know my grandma so well, that I knew something horrible happened.
I didn’t know what it was, but I already was trying to escape what was about to come. And I just remember sitting in the garage, sitting in this minivan, and then my dad coming out to try and find me.
And he was like, hey, you need to come inside. We need to tell you something.
The family gathered inside. The news: Lauren’s 27-year-old uncle Steven had died in a car accident. He was drunk driving.
Lauren: He was like my idol, the funniest one in our family. And so all of a sudden, like my whole concept of death and grief shifted because now it wasn’t fun and exciting and mysterious. It was in my face. And it was so, so hard…
The family had the funeral at their local Catholic Church. Lauren says she felt numb, she doesn’t even remember crying.
Lauren: And they are very, very Catholic. My uncle not so much. Raised Catholic, but not very Catholic. And so we had a traditional Catholic mass for him.
His casket was in the back, covered with a cloth. They bless it with incense and holy water.
It’s a whole routine and it did not feel like him at all. And I do remember my grandpa kind of like cracking a joke, like, ‘oh, he hated incense.’ laughs
Afterwards he was buried. Lauren says the grief in the family was never really talked about.
Lauren: We didn’t talk about it so much so that I was terrified, which is what I think a lot of people are…  my grief turned into fear, and so I became afraid of death and dying and anything that had to do with death and dying.
I wouldn’t go to cemeteries. I didn’t actually step on a cemetery again until I was 19.
And look at me now (laughs).
Now… Lauren spends her time holding training workshops as part of Death Wives, a business she set up five years ago. She offers courses on all sorts of topics, from preparing your own funeral… to how to take care of a corpse at home… to planning an eco-friendly burial.
Today, confronting death and dying is her daily bread.
So what changed?
That … was her second encounter with death – at the age of 19.
Although she was terrified of all things spooky, Lauren says she was a typical goth-looking kid – black hair, bangs, black clothes…
Oh yeah, and her boyfriend at the time worked in a funeral home. As an apprentice embalmer.
Lauren: And he asked me one day if I would ever help with office stuff. And I was like, ‘I could, just as long as I don’t have to really be around dead bodies.’
And he was like, ‘OK, yeah, that’s fine.’
And one day they were all at a funeral and they called and they said, ‘hey, we have a baby at the hospital, we need you to pick up. It’s really easy. It’s just a baby. There’s a box in the backroom, just grab that, give it to the nurse and the baby will go in the box and you just bring him home.’
And just first off terrified, like, ‘you want me to go pick up a, a dead baby?’
And then as I’m walking back, I was like, who would put a baby in a box? Like what? No, I’m not going to do that. And so I found a little blanket that we had back there and I had gotten my little Volkswagen Jetta and drove to the hospital and brought the blanket in and went to the nurse at the front and I said, ‘hi, I’m from this Funeral Home, I’m here to pick up this baby.’
And I just handed her the blanket.
And in my head I’m thinking, what am I doing here? What is even going on?
So she brought out a perfectly wrapped up like a burrito baby boy, he was full term, stillborn and his face was covered. And so I’m just holding this baby, walking out of the hospital as fast as I can, hoping nobody’s going to notice what’s happening.
And then I’m like, just, I just can feel it still shaking so hard. And I get into my car and I, I just put him on the passenger seat and I buckle him in because I don’t know what else to do.
So she’s sitting in the car heart-beating fast, a knot in her stomach. The wrapped up body of a baby is lying on the seat next to her. And, well, Lauren admits this next bit sounds a bit woo-woo.
Lauren: And in the moment, I’m sitting there still shaking, and I can all of a sudden just feel this like rush of love. And just this like warm feeling and I was like, ‘what is this?’ And it was like, I could feel everything that this baby was carrying, like all the love that the parents have been putting into him, all these dreams. And now here he was with me. That is my like aha moment, as Oprah would say, where it was like: this isn’t scary. This is somebody that is so loved and like now I’m caring for him. What? What an honor. Like, wow.
And I was like, ‘that’s it. This is what I’m, I am supposed to do this. I’m supposed to help people.’ And yeah, I never looked back.
In her early 20s, Lauren moved to Colorado and became a funeral director, working in corporate funeral homes. It’s an industry worth around $20 billion dollars in the US.
But she soon became disillusioned with the way they “do death” in America.
Lauren says she was often put under pressure to sell families expensive funeral packages, which can run to $10,000 or more. She began to question the whole system.
Lauren: Death in general isn’t talked about. So a lot of people just use the Funeral Home that someone else in their family used or their neighbor used and suggested. They don’t even call funeral homes to get prices from other places…
You just kind of say, I’m going to choose this. The person that works there is the authority and they’re going to tell me what I need. That’s why there’s the word funeral director. We’re going to direct you on what you need… And so families just go in blind and they leave with the package that they assume they’re supposed to do. But it doesn’t need to be that way.
It was around this time that Lauren started learning that it’s also possible to do your own DIY funeral, at home – bypassing funeral homes altogether. Using simple materials, rather than fancy caskets. That embalming isn’t a requirement. Instead, the family can take care of their loved one’s body themselves, keeping it on ice for a few days until the funeral.
It was an idea that appealed to Lauren right away. She’d never heard it talked about before. So she decided that she would start doing just that.
Lauren: And so I took that information. And I’m a funeral director and I don’t know it, so of course the general public probably doesn’t know it.
She left the funeral home business and started teaching people about ‘home funerals’ instead.
Lauren: And then in that time, as I’m teaching about home funerals, is when I started learning how bad our modern death care practices are for our environment.
The environmental footprint of an average person’s funeral will pale in comparison to the impact of their activities during their lifetime. It’s important to mention that.
But sixty-one million people die each year. Three million of them in the US.
And what happens to all of these bodies can have an impact on the planet.
Elena: It is really important because everybody dies. So this is something that affects every single person in the world.
Elena: So my name is Elena Slominski.
Elena’s a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine, in the school of Social Ecology. And she’s done research into evolving funeral practices and their environmental impacts.
Elena: And coming up with more sustainable solutions for how we want to dispose of bodies and do something that gives back to the earth. I think that is absolutely something that’s super important to think about and look into.
So, first, we’re going to take a closer look at those two main methods of body disposal we referred to at the top of the show: cremation, and the traditional casketed burial.
The National Funeral Directors Association says around 62% of people in the US opt for cremation. This is when the body is burned for two hours or more at around 800 degrees Celsius – just under 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s energy intensive and relies on burning fossil gas.
A standard cremation can result in up to 150 kilograms of carbon emissions being released – depending on the weight and size of the body. That’s like driving more than 600 kilometers in a car.
Elena: So with over 2 million cremations in the US every year, we’re producing well over 250 million kilograms of CO2 a year just from cremation. And that’s about the equivalent of driving to the moon and back 1300 times annually. So that’s quite a substantial carbon footprint.
It’s not just CO2 that’s the problem. Cremation can also release other harmful gases like nitrogen oxides and particulate matter. These can end up in the environment – polluting the air and even building up in the food chain.
And then there are the actual ashes that are left at the end. Scattering them somewhere meaningful may sound like a nice idea, but think again.
Elena: That in itself is actually harmful to ecosystems because they have a very high pH level and a high sodium content. And so that doesn’t break down. Ever. And it can actually impede plant growth and ecosystems. And so it seems like such a beautiful and natural thing to do to sort of spread ashes in a nice place. But there’s entire lakes where a lot of people spread ashes and it changes the pH level of the lakes. And so it’s really not good for ecosystems to do that either.
The other dominant option in the States is the conventional or traditional burial in a casket. About a third of people are buried this way. In North America, the body is routinely embalmed. That means the blood is drained and replaced with carcinogenic embalming chemicals to preserve the corpse.
Elena: And so every year, we bury 16.2 million liters of highly toxic embalming fluid into the ground, and that can leach formaldehyde and arsenic and other chemicals into the soil and groundwater.
The body is kept in a casket made of hard lacquered wood, steel or bronze, and interred in a concrete vault.
Elena: So we’re burying 1.45 billion kilograms of concrete into the earth every year
Steel and concrete are carbon-intensive materials… so using them to make these caskets and vaults also leads to emissions, as does transporting them across the country. And there are other substances going in the cemetery ground as well.
Elena: the paint and varnish on caskets, the polyester and other man-made materials that are in the clothing of the body, but also in the lining of the casket that can contain microplastics. And those can take hundreds of years to decompose.
Concerns about climate change and our impact on the planet are growing.
At the same time, so are eco-friendly alternatives for dealing with death.
And there seems to be some interest among sustainably minded folks.
A survey published this year by the US National Funeral Directors Association found 68% of people were interested in at least exploring “green” funeral options. 
There are a host of start-ups and green funeral homes springing up to try and break into the funeral market.
So what exactly are they offering? And are they really “green”?
Let’s go through the three main options real quick.
Ok. So perhaps the most eco-friendly choice is known as a green or natural burial. The body is put in something biodegradable, like a shroud or a simple wicker or pinewood casket. It’s buried in a nature area or natural burial ground and left to decompose overtime. There’s no embalming allowed, no metal, no concrete. If you were listening at the top of the episode, this is how death worker Lauren wants to be buried.
Lauren: And so natural burial is probably what other countries consider burial. … You’re buried about 3 feet deep versus the six feet, and at 3 feet, we still have living organisms. There’s still life. And so the body can break down and actually feed the soil, rejuvenate the land.
Next, there’s “water cremation,” also known as aquamation or alkaline hydrolysis.
The body is put inside a pressurized steel container filled with heated water and alkali that dissolves flesh and organs over several hours. The remaining bones are then crushed into powder. So the result is similar to fire cremation, but without emitting CO2 and other pollutants. Here’s Lauren again:
Lauren: We get the water back at the end that’s nutrient rich…We have a flower farm in Denver that specifically uses the water after the full process to grow flowers, so family members can come out and pick flowers that were once their loved one. It’s really beautiful.
And then we still at the end have the bones. And they’re soft, like powdered sugar almost. So people can still have those, they can still scatter them, but now we’re not doing any damage to the environment.
And the newest option on the market is Natural Organic Reduction, also known as human composting. This is when the body is put in a container with organic materials like wood chips, straw and alfalfa. It gets supplied with water and oxygen, and eventually turns into nutrient-dense soil in four weeks and 6 months – depending on the facility.
Lauren: If anyone has a composter or compost at home, you know that just water and oxygen and the organic materials are going to heat up … So it’s really just making the prime conditions to help breakdown a body.
Some facilities use the soil to restore land in local nature areas or send it to families to use in their gardens.
Water cremation and body composting are promoted as eco-friendly, but they still use some energy. Or in the case of water cremation – a lot of water. But estimates from those offering these services say they use significantly less energy – more than 80% less – than flame cremation and conventional burials. And some facilities solely use renewable energy to power the process, reducing their emissions even further.
Elena: So when I was doing this research, that was really the question that was driving me that I was like, wow, this seems so great, why aren’t we all doing this?
Elena at the University of California says these green funeral alternatives are still pretty niche.
The US National Funeral Directors Association found that only around 10% of people over the age of 40 would actually choose a natural or green burial.
And for water cremation and body composting?
Elena: It’s about 5% combined. So those are each about 2 1/2 percent. So those are even more niche sort of on the sideline. Most people haven’t ever heard of eco funerals, so there is this lack of awareness that is definitely an obstacle to wider adoption of these practices, that it’s just not really a mainstream thing yet.
That’s where Lauren comes in. One of the workshops she teaches with Death Wives is about green funeral alternatives.
Lauren: In Colorado, where I live, it’s like 74% of people choose fire cremation. And Colorado is supposed to be one of those green states and we are, we’re very eco-friendly and yet we do these fire cremations and people just don’t know. They have no idea. And so it is a passion of mine to tell people because there’s other options and a lot of people do care about the environment.
And so when they realize like their last footprint that they’re leaving is so harmful…. I have had many people change their wills or their funeral plans to water cremation or natural burial or the human composting. And that makes me really happy.
Elena says there are also a lot of misconceptions about what is allowed and what isn’t. Which can lead people to resort to the default options without looking any further.
Elena: A lot of people believe that embalming is legally required as a public health measure, but that’s just simply not the case. A lot of funeral homes do require it through their own policies, but it’s not actually a legal requirement anywhere. You don’t even have to use a Funeral Home in most states. But a lot of people just don’t know that.
But even if more people wanted to take advantage of greener funeral options, many Americans won’t find it easy to access them.
As things stand, water cremation is only legal in 28 states. Human composting is legal in 12… but a handful of other states are in the process of introducing laws.
When it comes to green burials, there are several hundred natural burial grounds in the US. But again, they aren’t spread evenly across the country and might be difficult to reach for people living in urban areas.
Some families may travel across state lines to get their loved one composted, or give them a water cremation. But the carbon footprint of making that journey could cancel out any environmental benefit.
And Elena says there’s another obstacle — resistance from within the funeral industry itself.
Elena: They still continue to oppose eco funeral practices because they really started as more of this this grassroots kind of movement.
But as the movement has continued growing, some funeral businesses have embraced this movement and adopted it as a profitable addition to their service menu to keep up with those industry directions and consumer preferences as it becomes more and more popular as people learn more about and hear more about it. You want to be able to keep up with that as a business, you know, you want to say, oh, hey, we offer this… So it is really in their own interest to kind of jump on board with this and make that make that part of their business.
There are a lot of things to consider when making funeral arrangements. Sustainability is just one factor. There are also religious and cultural traditions, for example – and of course, the cost.
Now, cost can vary a lot, depending on how elaborate the service is. But in general, direct flame cremations are between $1,500 to $3,000. That’s excluding a funeral service. Water cremations are around the same.
Depending on the company, human composting can cost between $3,000 and $7,000.
At the upper end of the scale is a conventional burial – with embalming, casket viewing and funeral, which can have a price tag of around $10,000 or more. A natural burial with simple materials can cost anything from a few hundred bucks for the burial plot, to a few thousand.
So we’ve heard that cremation has become the number one ‘body disposal method’ if you will. And one of the reasons it’s such a popular option is because it’s relatively cheap.
By 2040, the cremation rate in the US is predicted to reach 80%.
So it’s kind of hard to believe that just 50 years ago, only 5% of Americans were getting cremated.
But it’s become mainstream, thanks to price, shrinking space for cemeteries and changing religious views.
Elena says one thing we can learn here, is that the way society deals with the dead can evolve.  
Elena: We sort of tend to think that, oh, these are the traditions, this is our culture. This is just what’s always done. But that’s really not the case.
She says just going back 200 years, in the early 1800s, burials were simple, community-oriented and by default pretty green, or natural affairs.
Elena: And then when the Civil War broke out in the 1860s in the US, that really brought the first major shift in funeral practices just simply out of necessity because masses of fallen soldiers needed to be transported far distances back to their home, and they were being transported on trains in the heat.
Hmmm sounds rather… unpleasant. What to do?
Well, embalming saved the day. And it soon became a popular way of preserving bodies. When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, it was thanks to embalming that his corpse was able to travel hundreds of miles across the country on a funeral train. So the practice stuck and became standard.
Elena: Which then gave rise to an entirely new profession of funeral directors and then later the birth of the funeral industry in around the 1920s.
For decades, embalming at funeral homes and open-casket viewing was the norm, but in the 1960s and 70s, things changed again. Hello cremation.
Elena: It wasn’t until 2015 that cremation rates actually surpassed casketed burial rates for the first time in American history.
And so this evolution of shifting funeral practices really allows us to envision how things that are normal in our culture today might not always be that way.
In fact, Elena believes another shift is just around the corner. That’s because there are about 73 million baby boomers in the US who are nearing the end of their lives. And she says they could play a crucial role in whether greener funeral practices really catch on.
Elena: That’s a huge demographic and so they do have a lot of leverage to shape the future trajectory of funeral practices both in the US and also around the world… because a lot of baby boomers, you know, they grew up with the original environmental movement of in the 60s and you know, a lot of hippies. So a lot of people in that generation are very interested in wanting to do the more environmentally friendly thing.
…A lot of baby boomers also are more proactive in pre-planning their own funerals and looking into options ahead of time rather than just leaving it up to the family…And so that’s another reason why they’ve really been leading this shift and pioneers in this industry.
Elena predicts that, just like cremations, eco-funerals could eventually become the norm.
Elena: It took about 100 years actually for cremation to reach the 5% mark in the US. And that was really a tipping point at which it started growing at an accelerated pace starting in the in the 1970s.
And so with eco funerals, I think we’re actually going to reach that tipping point much quicker. There’s a lot more media coverage that’s helping spread awareness. There’s people are generally more concerned about reducing their environmental impact. So if you can offer eco funerals at a similar price point, a lot of people are going to be interested in that.
You know, we are becoming more and more aware of climate change. It’s becoming harder and harder to ignore and we’re really seeing the effects of it now and people are starting to really, really pay more attention to it.
It is hard to talk about death.
It can be morbid, awkward, and just awfully sad to confront our own mortality. Or the death of someone close.
And when death does happen, it’s usually dealt with pretty fast behind the closed doors of a funeral home or hospital. Often people are so overwhelmed and struck by grief, that they want it all to be over as quickly as possible.
That’s why Lauren encourages people in her workshops to make their funeral plans WELL BEFORE they’re at death’s door. She also wants people to talk about death more openly and more often.
Lauren: You can have it all pre planned out and it’s ready to go and you can figure out what options you have and you can feel like what feels right for me, what feels right for my family.
She says having more time to consider all the options means people can make informed decisions, rather than rushing into the default cremation or casket burial – which can harm the environment.
Lauren: It’s not like planning for a wedding and then you never get married.
You will die, your loved ones will die. Like planning this will be used like it’s not just something to do for fun. It will be of service to you guaranteed. And so even just taking an hour and calling some funeral homes or researching what are some options in my area can really just be the education that people need, but they don’t do that. So I educate and that’s what I do.
That includes letting people know their rights. Like, legally, across the US, you have 24 hours before you have to decide what happens to the deceased. After that, Lauren says, they need to be either be put in a cooler, embalmed, or they can be kept at home – on ice.
Lauren says she’s a big fan of the third option.
Lauren: And so that’s what we do. Is we cool the body down with ice. And so the same area that really starts decomposing you, your stomach, your, your neck, everything where those bacterias live, we just wrap either dry ice or ice packs and pillow cases and then just place them on them and that’s it. It slows down the decomposition process.
She says many families find having the body at home for 1 or 2 days to be particularly healing, because they can take their time to say goodbye. Rather than sticking to the constraints of a funeral home.
Lauren: I’ve done so many home funerals where they don’t practice any embalming and the family gets to see them and go, wow, that’s my loved one. They look like how they looked before. It doesn’t look like they have fillers and a tan and pink lipstick on. Even though it’s a man. That can be very jarring for people. But when we see people just dead, it’s time now for our heart and our brain to catch up.
It’s not for everyone, though. Lauren says sometimes people find the idea icky, or assume it’s illegal.
Lauren: it’s interesting ’cause it’s so alien to us now. But when I told my grandpa about this, he was like, ‘Oh yeah, we had my aunt’s body laid out at home on the farm, on the kitchen table. I remember that.’
So thinking about it, most people first think it’s illegal. Because they just assume that a body has to go to a Funeral Home because we don’t know anything different. The body always will belong to the family first and foremost.
Lauren says being informed and talking about death won’t take away grief when it does strike. But being well prepared ahead of time can give families the space they need to celebrate the person they lost.
Lauren: Be present in this because it’s really sad, just the same way you would be present at somebody’s wedding, or at a birth. It’s the same thing when somebody dies, and when we have funerals, and if we want to truly process that and have it become part of our life, we have to experience it.
Lauren practices what she preaches.
Of course – she has her whole funeral planned out.
SFX Safety Dance / Nick Cave /David Bowie
I’m really glad that I’ve been planning my funeral for so long because it really hasn’t changed. But it does get a little bit more showy. Like I have time to plan this!
I want to have like a big party. So I want there to be photos of me with different songs that matter to me.
She wants to have a home funeral, with her body wrapped in a biodegradable shroud.
I want everyone to come up and tell stories. And then I would love to have like an old cart or horse drawn carriage take me to the natural burial preserve or where I’m going to be. I don’t know if that’s possible yet, but that’s my hope.
And then while they’re pulling my carriage, all of my friends are behind me throwing confetti and have streamers and we’re playing the song Safety Dance by Men in Hats, skipping and dancing.
And then I have all my funeral songs already planned out as well.
OK, so I have Nick cave into my arms. That’s one of my favorite.
From the Peter Pan musical, I’m flying. Life is a cabaret, from cabaret.
Starman by David Bowie…
I really want it to be a celebration of my life.
I also want everyone to wear red lipstick. Typically I always wear red lipstick so I want to have red lipstick out for even the guys to have to wear.
See, I’ve thought of it. I really have! And it’s because if I do die unexpectedly before my mom, I don’t want her to be like, Oh my God, I want to honor my child the right way.
‘Don’t worry, mom, I already did it for you. We got it all laid out.’
And any of us can do that anytime.
I think back to my uncle’s funeral in the Catholic Church and how I didn’t grieve him… It could have been anybody’s funeral to me. And that’s not how we’re supposed to celebrate a life that gave us life. You know, it’s sad, but it’s also joyful because they did live.
Again, we put so much planning detail into ‘oh, my wedding. I want these flowers and these dresses.’ I’ve been married twice and both times were in a courthouse. So I never got to use my big elaborate wedding plans, but I’ll get to use my big elaborate funeral plans. I can guarantee you.