Name: The rise of eco-friendly options for your body after death
Uploaded: 2022-05-16
Duration: 6 min 16 s
Description: A growing number of people say they want their last act to have a positive impact on the planet.

A growing number of people say they want their last act to have a positive impact on the planet.

The rise of eco-friendly options for your body after death

Environment

the current modern burial practices are unsustainable. We have two choices. The first is burial, we take the body, we often improvement that is filling it with formaldehyde, we place the body in the coffin, we placed the coffin in the cement and rebar lined hole in the ground where it then it's for a very long time. The second choice is cremation and that was always seen as the ecological alternative takes about 30 gallons of fuel to perform and puts about £530 of C. 02 into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. If this was about food or about cars, we'd be having this conversation years ago we'd have been talking about solutions to but what we're talking about is dying and this is not a topic anyone wants to touch. Ultimately it's meant we've never come up with reasonable solutions to deal with it. But I think that's changing very, very rapidly and we're going to see a movement come at amazing speed to really upend this industry and change the status quo. I'm john need felt thomas, I am the chief association executive for the Green burial Council International, the Green Burial Council mission and is to promote natural burial practices. The organization has two arms essentially one which certifies green burial providers. Those are green burial places and spaces and products and then an education arm that I serve as the leader of which educates the public and providers about green burial options. So a green burial at its most basic form is a un embalmed body in the ground with a simple covering perhaps a cotton shroud. And then there are natural burial cemeteries which are think of more of a meadow. If you look at the number of natural and green burial cemeteries 2015 is kind of the point. It was really good hard data was being captain of a little over 100. Now there are nearly 350. My name is Phil Olsen and I'm an associate professor in the department of Science and Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. I consider myself a technology emphasis. Um, and one of the main areas of interest for me and my teaching and research or technology is involved in the disposition of human remains. So I think there is this interesting shift going on in the sense of like collective death, right? Kind of understanding ourselves as kind of, you know, being a part of this bigger collective picture. I think we're now thinking about death and scale in a way that we weren't before thinking about death in terms of like the sheer impact of human flesh on the planet and recognizing, oh wait, we have to think about this in a much bigger way. My name is Micah Truman. I'm the ceo of return home and we perform termination which gently transforms human remains into. So in the very beginning, when returned home was founded, our whole purpose was to figure out a way to gently return a person back to the earth and to make sure that the last choice we make on this planet is to get back to it and not to pollute it. And that seems like a simple thing, but there is a lot to do. Their first we developed the science that is the process. And then next we developed the technology on a prototype basis. We made an in vessel technology. Each vessel is eight ft long by 3.5 ft wide by 3.5 ft tall. Um Ultimately, we then made all of that. We fabricated all of that equipment and finally, we outfitted an 11.5 1000 square foot facility in auburn Washington just south of Seattle and built the first large scale interrogation facility in the world. And it's been the work of a lifetime. We place a layer of what we call organics at the bottom of the vessel, alfalfa, straw and sawdust. We placed the body on top of that of those organics. We then fill the rest the rest of the vessel up with the remaining organics. And we put it into our special system that moves oxygen through the vessel. After a month, the body is completely terra mated and what we have left our bones, we reduce those bones into fragments. We left the soil, sit for one more month, which is a total of two months and we have beautiful soil that we can then give back to the family. We are built to transform back. We're meant to go back to the earth. Were literally hardwired to do it. The microbes in our body. But things that digest the food, we can also transform us and return us to the earth. Death and dying is an uncomfortable conversation for for lots of people. So we really have an organization. The Green burial Council encourages lots of pre planning and conversations and we give people tools to to have those conversations. This is not about saying the current funeral industry is wrong and doing everything badly. It's really about providing options. We are very accustomed to a family in funeral service, calling and arranging for the disposition of their loved ones. In our case, it's very common for the person who's dying to call us personally and say this is the only ray of light that's happening for me right now. This is what I'm hoping for. And this allows me to think about the next phase of my of my continuance and that is utterly mind blowing. It ensures that the last act we do on this planet is to get back to it. Yeah, mm hmm.