The Centre for Natural Burial

BY ROBERT KING • The Indianapolis Star

When people stop by the booth Nathan Butler sets up to promote his funeral home, they routinely tell him they aren’t interested in the trappings of a modern burial.
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“They say ‘Put me in a sheet and put me in a ditch,’ ” Butler said.

For many potential customers - and in the funeral business that’s everyone - Butler sees a growing recognition that modern burials are wasteful, needlessly expensive and a capstone to one’s life that is anything but earth-friendly.

So, Butler’s funeral home is positioning itself on the forefront of the next wave in death care: the green burial.

Though burials come in many shades, the greenest involve cemeteries that look less like golf courses and more like nature preserves, caskets made of cardboard and bodies that aren’t juiced up with embalming fluids - all at a fraction of the cost of a traditional burial.

Not confined to the tree huggers of the Pacific Northwest, green cemeteries have opened in places such as the South Carolina foothills and northeastern Ohio. There are two green cemeteries on the horizon in Indiana.

In Fort Collins, there are no green certified cemeteries. But Stephanie Goes, co-owner of Goes Funeral Care said she’s hoping that will change. Goes is the only certified funeral home in Colorado listed on the Web site of the Green Burial Council, a nonprofit that sets standards for natural burials.

Goes said that she has had discussions with city of Fort Collins officials about the creation of a green cemetery or at least a section in a cemetery.

“They like the idea, but there are obstacles to getting a green certified cemetery,” Goes said.
Final wasteland

In a society that is becoming more environmentally conscious about its coffee and cars, leaders of the green burial movement say it only makes sense that attention also would turn to the final choices of one’s life.

To the most zealous, the modern cemetery is something akin to an ecological wasteland: acres of grass manicured with fertilizers and pesticides, caskets fashioned from steel, copper, bronze or old-growth hardwoods and thick concrete vaults (the boxes in which the caskets are placed).

The corpse is most often embalmed in formaldehyde, which eventually will leach into the soil once the tomb is breached.

Goes said she can’t offer people a truly green burial but that people can be buried unembalmed in the city cemeteries in a biodegradable casket or shroud. However, the city requires a vault, which does not jibe with true green burial standards.

Mark Harris, whose book “Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial” (Scribner, 2007, $24) is the manifesto of the movement, said traditional cemeteries are a waste.

“If you look at your typical modern cemetery, it functions less as a natural, bucolic resting ground for the dead than as a landfill of largely nonbiodegradable - and in some cases toxic - material,” he said.

The Green Burial Council said enough casket metal is put into American soil every year to build a new Golden Gate bridge.

The green burial movement is still small - just 12 certified green cemeteries across the country and about 60 green-certified funeral homes. But the approaching deaths of baby boomers - the generation behind Earth Day - are pushing funeral industry leaders to anticipate a surge in requests for greener farewells.

Ecology aside, the green burial movement could turn the funeral business upside down in other ways.

Economically, modern burials that include embalming, steel caskets and concrete vaults can cost as much as $10,000 or more. Goes said green burials generally cost $2,500 plus $2,000 for the cemetery charge. She said direct cremation at her business costs $990.