Greening Our Burials

A Year of Essays: January 4, 2022

Desmond Tutu’s ashes were interred two days ago in Cape Town. He lay in a simple pine casket, then his body was aquamated, an eco-friendly alternative to cremation. Good for him. He led an exemplary life, and now an exemplary death.

I’ve always been fascinated with how we dispose of dead bodies. At age 7, I peered into my grandfather’s coffin, primarily to see if his chest would rise at which time I would call the whole thing off. However, I was transfixed by the satin lining, the plump pillow, his neatly pressed suit, his finest tie secured with his favorite tie clip. Why would we send all that ornamentation into the depth, never to be seen again? My other grandparents wanted to be buried in cherrywood; that idea was nixed as the coffins were outrageously expensive. I liked that my in-laws donated their bodies to medical students — a good use of a cadaver with no outlay of expense.

A few years ago, as a writer in a 24-hour play festival, I received these prompts: dystopian, set in a cemetery, with the theme “Be kind, everyone is fighting a battle” (misattributed to Plato). In my hotel room, I Googled “dystopian cemetery.” The sixth hit was an NPR story, “Avant-Garde Afterlife,” about the problems large metropolitan areas face as they run out of burial space. An old Toyota warehouse in Tokyo holding the urns of 7,200 families, vertical cemeteries in Scandinavia and the Middle East, a design for an “underground ‘Tower for the Dead’” in Mexico City — all examples of how to deal with the dead.

I clicked on a link in the article to DeathLab, a research and design group at Columbia University. One idea was anaerobic digestion, a process used for years for animal carcass disposal. A body would be placed in a vat, acid added to cause microbial methanogenesis, breaking down all the organic matter, and distilling the remains into basic chemical and biological components — biomass. Currently, the process takes days, but in refining, may be a viable choice to recycle cadavers as fuel.

Aquamation is similar, though it uses alkaline hydrolysis. The body is placed in a stainless steel vessel, then filled with a solution that is 95% water and 5% alkali. The solution is heated to 200°-300°F which then circulates for several hours until all material is gone except inorganic bone minerals; the liquefied remains are returned to the ecosystem. This process saves 90% of the energy used when bodies are cremated.

These green burials, and others like mycoremediation (burial with mushrooms specially trained to devour a human corpse), body composting, sea or sky burial, and natural burial, help reduce carbon footprints, have minimal environmental impact, and conserve natural resources. And they are considerably less costly than traditional burial.

Even in death, Desmond Tutu still teaches us — be mindful of others, respect the earth, know the perils of climate change, and do what we can to lessen the carbon impact. What an ambassador for the Earth!

Halime, Farah. “Avant-Garde Afterlife: Space Shortage Inspires New Burial Ideas.” NPR, December 13, 2014. https://www.npr.org/2014/12/13/370446879/avant-garde-afterlife-space-shortage-inspires-new-burial-ideas