You’re most likely going to die, and you should probably think about what you want to do with your remains when that happens.
By Tayla Ham - May 2nd 2023
If you haven’t thought about your funeral, it can be pretty overwhelming, especially when you discover that it's a changing and developing landscape. You need to consider if you want a traditional funeral, or one that celebrates your life as it was? Then, there's the environmental impact of dying and the eco-funeral movement. Let's break down these issues.
In Australia, several new funeral companies have opened up. Generally, these companies are headed by younger funeral directors that don’t “sign on to all the tenants of what funeral homes are,” says Nastassia Jones, the co-founder of The Last Hurrah. The Last Hurrah, based in Thornbury, is one of these new funeral homes. Opened in late 2019, they aim to provide unique and authentic funerals to their community and have already done over 500 funerals.
Before opening The Last Hurrah, Jones used to work for another, more traditional funeral company. “I have always found that working in death care is kind of weird,” Jones explains, “you are meant to speak in hushed tones, I wasn’t allowed to wear red lipstick, and I had to wear beige stockings and hide tattoos. It just felt weird and disingenuous to me.”
After meeting her co-founder Kimba Griffiths, who has a birthing doula and celebrant background, the pair quickly decided that there needed to be a funeral company that was “more about being us,” Jones says. “Speaking normally, using terms that felt more comfortable to us, not performing weird rituals that funeral directors seem committed to doing. Like bowing to a coffin.”
The Last Hurrah and other less traditional funeral companies aim to provide support to the family of the deceased person while providing a farewell to them that is “congruent with what the person was about,” Jones explains. “It’s about the dead person. Not about our procedures. We try to give them the most fitting send-off, whatever that may look like.”
These farewells range from lengthy vigils to no-fuss funerals, body donations, the family taking the deceased home to lie in state, or even as Jones describes, a funeral where there is a request for “everyone to wear Crocs,” which Jones says is “freaking awesome. But no other funeral company, I’d imagine, would have their staff wearing Crocs at a funeral, no matter how much the person loved them.”
Approximately 70% of Australians will be cremated after they pass away, with roughly 25% choosing traditional burial. The other 5% choose body donation, natural burial, or other, newer methods for the disposition of their body. These percentages, however, vary greatly depending on the location and the clientele of the funeral company; as Jones explains, “about 97% of our services are cremation - which is reflective of the people who chose us.”
When looking at the two main options used in Australia, both have disadvantages environmentally. If a traditional coffin or casket is used, many resources are wasted. According to The Order of the Good Death, a death care activist team that operates out of the US, from American funerals alone, around 71,000 cubic meters of casket wood and 90,000 tons of steel are used each year in funerals.
Many funeral companies have a more environmentally conscious option for a coffin if requested. The Last Hurrah, for example, include a cardboard coffin with every package, plus a range of sustainable caskets and coffins.
The Order of The Good Death also warns against the practice of embalming in traditional funerals, as chemicals used in the process are carcinogenic. They claim that around 3 million litres of embalming fluids are used annually in US funerals alone.
A “green” or “natural” burial is the best way to reduce the environmental impact of traditional burial. According to the Natural Death Advocacy Network in Australia, if someone has said something like “Keep it simple and bury me under a tree,” chances are they might be interested in a natural burial. This is the burying of someone that allows for natural decomposition with minimal disruption to the surrounding ecosystems.
The major problem facing natural burials today is the scarcity of sites in Victoria; those that exist are highly regulated. Jones explains, “One of the really beautiful natural burial cemeteries in Carlsruhe has just closed, which is a real loss to Victoria. There are a few around, but they are not as accessible as we would like them to be.”
While most people think that cremation is a more sustainable option for the environment, you might be interested to find out it has a significant environmental impact too. The Order of the Good Death explains, “A single person’s cremation consumes as much energy as a [805km] car trip, emits mercury, sulphur dioxide.”
Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do to reduce the carbon emissions from a cremation; however, the Natural Death Advocacy Network recommends a shrouded cremation to at least reduce the waste of resources.
The Order of the Good Death provides the following tip: “Don’t buy funeral products that insist they are going to make a tree out of the ashes. For one thing, the tree doesn’t grow from the ashes because they basically turn to cement when they get wet.”
Jones made a very good point when looking at the environmental impact of dying and funeral companies, “eco-friendly things are developing; I would like to see it happen on a ground level. There are just so many wasted resources on such an easy-to-fix level that we would like addressed. Then we can go on to the big stuff.”
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