Funeral homes, cemeteries allow green movement to spread its wings
by Tami Kamin-Meyer , For Business First
Schoedinger Funeral and Cremation Service offers a variety of caskets made of biodegradable materials for customers interested in green burial practices.
The green movement isn’t just sweeping through the building industry these days. Funerals are becoming environmentally friendly as well. Ohio is at the forefront of the movement, said Joe Sehee, founder and executive director of the Green Burial Council in Sante Fe, N.M. “There’s a bigger green burial movement in Ohio than even in California,” he said.
In fact, only Michigan has more funeral homes offering green burials than Ohio, with Illinois and Wisconsin following close behind, he said.
Sehee sold his home to launch his organization in 2005. His goal was to set standards for retraining the funeral industry to become more green and to connect it with the environmental and conservation communities.
Green burial, he said, is a way of caring for the dead with minimal environmental impact. The practice typically involves formaldehyde-free embalming fluids and biodegradable burial materials in place of traditional vaults. Green burial also is considered more environmentally friendly than cremation, which burns fossil fuels and uses a lot of energy.
Sehee said green was the way Americans used to bury their dead, but since the Civil War, the use of embalming chemicals has become ubiquitous.
“Embalming, as is done in the U.S., is only practiced in seven or so countries. Most of the world does not use embalming liquids,” he said.
Embalming fluid is usually composed of the carcinogenic chemical formaldehyde, which has been shown to pose health risks in funeral homes, the council reports. A study by the National Cancer Institute released in late 2009 revealed that funeral directors had a high incidence of myeloid leukemia.
Adoption process slow
In a March survey commissioned by the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association, 25 percent of those polled liked the concept of environmentally friendly burials. Several options exist. One is a hybrid cemetery, a burial ground offering traditional and environmentally-friendly options. Another is natural burial grounds, where no chemicals or materials that do not decay are used. Another is a conservation burial facility operated by a nature conservancy and managed through a partnership of nonprofit organizations focused on environmental issues. Ohio’s Foxfield Preserve in Wilmot, which is in northeast Ohio, is such an arrangement.
In Central Ohio, the 14 Schoedinger Funeral and Cremation Service locations have been certified by Sehee’s council – which involves staff training and adjusting price lists to include environmentally friendly options – to offer green burials.
President Michael Schoedinger said in the two years his business has been offering the service, only two funerals he would define as purely green have occurred. However, his company has been involved in many funerals that have included aspects of green burials. For example, Schoedinger sells a green wicker-looking basket casket, actually made from sea grass, which he described as “completely biodegradable.”
And while the actual number of truly environmentally friendly burials is minimal compared with the volume handled by Schoedinger’s company, he isn’t sorry he went through the certification program.
“We get inquiries,” he said, noting that when groups tour his funeral homes and they learn of environmentally-friendly burial options, their interest is piqued.
While Schoedinger doesn’t expect an immediate surge in green burials, he thinks the Baby Boomer generation has a tendency to think outside the box and may opt to try something different.
“Funerals will be more and more personalized about the life that was lived,” he predicted, leaving room for one final expression of individuality by being buried in a green-friendly manner.
Options growing
In Columbus, there are at least two cemeteries catering to environmentally friendly burials, although they aren’t certified by the Green Burial Council to do so.
Thor Triplett owns and operates Evergreen Burial Park and Eastlawn Cemetery located across the street from one another on Woodland Avenue near Port Columbus International Airport. He said green burials are “getting rebranded to the point where it seems like a new-fangled concept, but it’s not.” He has about 40 green burials each year, whether that involves a body that has been embalmed with a non-formaldehyde fluid or one in a bio-degradable casket.
Ohio is one of 16 states, along with British Columbia, that is home to at least one burial ground certified by the Green Burial Council. In addition, a group is pursuing the creation of a nature conservancy-based burial site in St. Louis, so Missouri would then join the list.
The Wilderness Center, a 619-acre nature conservancy and land trust in Ohio’s Wayne County, purchased an adjacent 43-acre site a decade ago to restore it ecologically.
In order to fund the restoration, the Wilderness Center created Foxfield Preserve, the nation’s first green cemetery operated by a nonprofit conservation group. Native prairie grasses have been planted and reforestation has begun, so that over the next 100 years, nature will dominate the landscape.
According to Gordon Maupin, executive director of the Wilderness Center, those lands are a “nature preserve first, then a cemetery. Restoration and ecology are all in line with a nature preserve, but we bury bodies there to generate funds.”
Bodies buried at Foxfield Preserve are not enclosed in a vault and plots are “low density … because we want enough space between bodies so nature will dominate,” Maupin said.
The lawns are neither mowed nor manicured to allow for reforestation and prairie establishment. In addition, grave markers are optional and, if used, are modest in size, he said.
When visitors wish to find a buried body, Foxfield Preserve provides a hand-held GPS system. Guests enter the grave’s coordinates and the device guides them to its location.
If a body is embalmed prior to burial, only nontoxic chemicals certified by Sehee’s organization are acceptable.
And, one of the biggest manufacturers of nontoxic embalming liquids is Champion Co., based in Springfield. Spokeswoman Lisa Dorsey said the Enigma product line is “all-natural for green burials.”
Foxfield Preserve has other requirements for environmentally friendly burials.
“We ask funeral directors to dress the body in natural fibers,” Maupin said. If the body is embalmed at all, it then is placed in a biodegradable container, made from wood or cardboard. The container “must be able to decompose,” he said
Embalming a body does little to inhibit its decomposition, Maupin said. “Dust to dust. There’s no avoiding that, no matter what. You will become dust again.”
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