Eco-friendly dying
By Peter Hadzipetros, CBC News
You’ve done your bit for the environment during your lifetime - minimizing to whatever extent possible your consumption of non-renewable resources and your discharge of stuff that is bad for the air we breathe and the water we drink.
You know you won’t last forever, that someday, you will check out for good as a consumer of the planet’s resources. You want that checkout process to be as environmentally friendly as possible.
Well, you do have options, but you’ve got to do a little legwork — long before your final trip to the hereafter.
If you’re looking for a traditional burial, you can insist that your body not be embalmed. Embalming fluid is typically a mixture of chemicals such as formaldehyde, methanol, ethanol and other solvents. Its purpose is to temporarily prevent your body from decomposing so people can see you lying in your casket at least until you are buried.
While formaldehyde — or other chemicals — won’t harm you after you’re dead, it can present a bit of a problem for the living. The International Agency for Research on Cancer concluded in 1995 that formaldehyde probably causes cancer in humans.
You can pick an old-fashioned plain pine box. A Lindsay, Ont.-based company, Northern Casket Ltd., is offering a line of coffins with the environment in mind. The company offers eight different EnviroCaskets that are made of wood that’s grown locally. They contain no metal parts and the fabrics used in the interiors are all made from undyed, unbleached cotton and cellulose materials.
The coffins are finished in either natural walnut oil or beeswax — not the traditional petrochemical products such as lacquer, varnish, urethanes and varathanes that release some harmful emissions when buried or cremated.
All materials used in the casket should degrade within 60 years, assuming that the casket is not placed in a concrete vault.
But if you want one, you can’t buy one directly. You’ll have to find a funeral director who carries the product. Northern Casket first introduced the line about 10 years ago, but company vice-president Caley Ferguson says it’s tough to get new product into funeral directors’ showrooms. Ferguson used the recent Green Living show in Toronto as a first attempt to appeal directly to the public.
“You have two options in this business,” Ferguson told CBC News Online. “You either have to get the funeral directors to carry the product or persuade the public to ask for it.”
Ferguson said response to the EnviroCasket at the three-day show exceeded his expectations.
Or you could take it a few steps further and opt for a “natural burial”. The natural burial movement began in Britain in the early 1990s, and now there are more than 200 sites in the United Kingdom and five in the United States where your body can be returned to nature. Bodies are not embalmed. They are buried in either a simple casket or a shroud in a protected green space. Headstones are not permitted, but flat indigenous stones can be engraved and used to mark your final resting place.