The Centre for Natural Burial

Practice Protects the Environment and Costs Less
By Vonda Sines, AC

The expression “sleeps with the fishes” has taken on a new meaning.

An emerging new movement in this country for simpler and cheaper burials that are also more environmentally friendly has resulted in new and more creative final resting places. One example, according to an article by Elizabeth Birge in the September 29 Washington Post, is placing remains in a concrete ball in the Atlantic Ocean.

The ball is part of a New Jersey site is seven miles southeast of Great Egg Inlet. It comprises a portion of an artificial reef where fish congregate, plants thrive, and fisherman angle. Individuals who can dive to the site will be able to visit their relatives’ graves.

According to Birge, the goal of the memorial reef movement is to return human beings to the earth using as little intervention as possible and while simultaneously saving green space. The practice of green burial is sometimes referred to as natural burial.

Typically, the body is not embalmed and is placed in either a coffin made of biodegradable wood or a wrap arranged by a funeral director. It is interred in a grave without a concrete liner.

While cremation is considered a type of natural burial, it doesn’t rate a 10. This is because the process uses energy for completion and releases dioxin and mercury into the environment. However, its “footprint” is so small, cremation is accepted as a means of green burial.

One of the most popular green burial locations is Greensprings Natural Cemetery in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. The 100 acres of protected meadows and woods comprise one of “a handful” of similar cemeteries in California, Florida, Texas, New York, and Washington State, according to Birge. The first green cemetery opened for business in South Carolina in 1998.

The Washington Post article cites figures from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) stating that the typical cost of a standard or traditional funeral is around $6,000. By contrast, the price tag of a green burial is around $2,000. If the family decides to cremate the body and scatter the ashes, the cost is still lower.

The article also advises that most funeral directors believe preparations must occur more quickly with a natural versus a standard burial because bodies that are not embalmed start to decompose immediately. Green burial practices overall are similar to those mandated by several religious faiths, where bodies must be buried quickly after death and without embalming.

Greensprings indicates that the cemetery will accept embalmed bodies if transport requirements from the originating state require the procedure. While no gravestones are permitted, friends or relatives may arrange for a marker made from local fieldstone to be engraved and placed on top of the grave. All soil extracted for the burial is placed in a mound atop the grave and allowed to settle, with several subsequent gradings.

The Greensprings web site summarizes some of the expenses and non-green practices of the 22,500 cemeteries in the United States each year. Among them: use of 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid, 90,272 tons of steel and 2,700 tons of cooper and bronze in caskets, 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete and 14,000 tons of steel in vaults, and more than 30,000,000 board feet of hardwoods (much of it considered tropical wood) for caskets.

The site estimates that depending upon the type of lawn mower used, cutting grass for just an hour in a standard cemetery emits pollution equivalent to driving a car up to 650 miles. It states the average cemetery buries 1,000 gallons of embalming fluid, more than 97 tons of steel, in excess of 2,000 tons of concrete, and more than 56,000 board feet of high-quality wood in only one acre of green.

Greensprings also maintains it’s possible to drive nearly 4,800 miles on the amount of equivalent energy utilized for one cremation or to the moon and back 83 times on the energy required for all the cremations in the United States in just one year.