Going to Ground
Coffin saleswoman Cynthia Beal is bullish on the Ecopod.
By Steve Goldstein, Obit Magazine
“I’ve had the great experience of feeding people,” said Beal, who formerly owned a natural foods store. “Now I get to compost them.”
Long after the advent of biodegradable packaging, here’s the last package you’ll ever need.
Enter the Ecopod, the first biodegradable coffin made of recycled paper. Available for a decade in England, it has finally been introduced in the United States. Shaped like a seed pod and available in four colors with accompanying adornments, the Ecopod is in the vanguard of the “green” burial movement.
Beal sells the Ecopod through her Natural Burial Company in Portland, Ore., where a newly opened store – the first biodegradable urn and coffin shop in the country, she says – features a customized white Ecopod in the window.
As it turns out, this is Beal’s own coffin.
“I like the idea of coffins being handmade, the humanness and the spiritual aspect of that,” she said.
And how much is that Ecopod in the window?
About $3,400, said Beal, or roughly $300 more than the average steel or hardwood casket. But special orders can run to over $5,000 per unit if the Ecopod has to be shipped quickly to the United States.
Ecopods are fabricated out of a slurry of recycled newspapers and a mix of office paper, which dries nicely into a rigid form.
“If you’re a frustrated novelist, you could be buried in your book that didn’t sell,” Beal observed. She offered to make me an Ecopod out of back issues of The Philadelphia Inquirer, but I told her I first wanted to see how newspaper circulation figures held up. Of course, with all the talk of newspapers dying, why not be buried in something that may vanish anyway?
Beal said the Ecopod makes sense to her.
“What the Ecopod does for me is open my mind, and it opens the minds of the people I’m asking to consider natural burial, and what it might mean for both their personal ‘leaving’ and the planet they’re leaving behind,” she said by telephone from her shop.
Beal said about 10 to 15 Ecopods are available in America. The first U.S. interment occurred in mid-July in Visalia Cemetery in central California where Jorgi Wu was laid to rest in a forest green Ecopod with a Celtic cross on top.
Wu suffered from ALS – so-called Lou Gehrig’s disease – and became interested in the Ecopod in 2006, according to Wu’s daughter, Lara Weyland.
“It was very fitting for my father,” Weyland said in an interview. “He was an artist and lived his life wanting to be on the outside of what was traditional. The Ecopod spoke to his artistic sensibility.”
The Ecopod weighs only about 45 pounds so machinery isn’t necessary for interment. The caskets don’t dent or scratch and “you can throw them into the back of an SUV,” said Beal. They can even be used at home before their end use.
“They make great blanket chests,” Beal noted.
Depending on the soil, the Ecopods will get wet and soft within a few weeks and degrade in as little as six months, she said.
Biodegradable doesn’t have to be drab. Ecopods are available in red with an Aztec sun design, blue with white doves, and all-white – ready to be customized.
The Ecopod has a colorful history. It was developed in England by Hazel Selina, who was inspired to envision “green” funerals and design the Ecopod about 12 years ago after caring for a close family friend during a terminal illness.
“I felt the shape of a coffin had been with us for many years and had become associated with negative icons such as vampires,” Selina told a British newspaper. “I wanted to design something beautiful, ethical and made out of recycled material.”
Selina, who was running a birth center at the time, found a factory in the middle of a peat bog in Ireland that could make them out of papier mache. When the mold cracked, Selina started fashioning them by hand from hardened newspaper.
“Most people don’t realize that what they are doing as a last act is poisoning the earth,” said Selina.
Buyers seem to appreciate the aesthetics of a paper casket.
“They want a striking and individual coffin that reflects the person who has died,” said Peter Rock, an executive with ARKA Ecopod Ltd., Selina’s manufacturing firm. “They see the beauty in the lines of the Ecopod and the organic shape softening the otherwise harsh lines of the traditional coffin.
Rock buried his mother-in-law in an Ecopod in November in a newly opened woodland burial site in Kent, England. Everyone said it was the best funeral they had attended, he reported.
“The Ecopod ‘lightens’ the occasion,” he explained, “and everyone seems to find it easier to get in touch with how they are feeling.”
In England, the Ecopod has met resistance from the funeral industry, which is unable to make a traditional profit on it or on any of the “green” coffin lines. So sales of natural coffins — bamboo, wicker, cardboard, seagrass — account for only about 5 percent of U.K. coffin sales.
Apart from the United States, Ecopods have been sold in France, Ireland, Belgium and Italy. Future markets for the Ecopod depend on whether the company can find an industrial partner abroad that can help with manufacturing and international distribution.
Cynthia Beal believes the U.S. market will embrace the Ecopod, citing research she has seen suggesting that 30 percent of Americans desire an environmentally friendly exit.
“Every indication I have is that people believe that this should be an option, and that if it is an option, they want it,” she said.
Nor has she experienced any resistance from traditional funeral operators, whom she hopes will soon offer the Ecopod. The only obstacle has been the requirement many U.S. cemeteries have for cement burial vaults, but there are woodland sites suitable for Ecopods.
“I’m hearing from funeral directors that they know green burials are coming,” she said. Her current sales slogan? “The LAST thing you want to be seen in.”