Post-mortem ecology: the rise of “green funerals”

Funer­al rites have not escaped the glare of the eco­lo­gic­al trans­ition. While altern­at­ive meth­ods of buri­al are slowly emer­ging, tra­di­tion­al means of buri­al and crema­tion are evolving to reduce eco­lo­gic­al impact, in par­tic­u­lar with the advent of green­er cemeteries.

In the words of André Malraux, “the most beau­ti­ful tomb is the memory of man”. The most eco­lo­gic­al, how­ever, has yet to be determ­ined. We are increas­ingly con­cerned about the envir­on­ment­al impact of our death, but we are still faced with a lim­ited choice. “Only two types of buri­al are leg­al in France,” says Mar­tin Juli­er Costes, a soci­olo­gist spe­cial­ising in end-of-life and bereave­ment issues. “These are buri­al and crema­tion. There is a third option, which is to donate one’s body to sci­ence,” he adds, “but very few people make this choice.” The major­ity (6 out of 10) of funer­als are buri­als. Crema­tion, on the oth­er hand, has become increas­ingly pop­u­lar since “the end of the 19th cen­tury and the author­isa­tion of crema­tion”. Accord­ing to the Asso­ci­ation Française d’Information Fun­éraire (Afif), crema­tion will account for 41% of funer­als by 2022, and more than 50% in many towns and cities.

These funer­al rites have a sig­ni­fic­ant eco­lo­gic­al foot­print. They gen­er­ate green­house gas emis­sions, con­sume nat­ur­al resources and pol­lute the soil. One of the only French stud­ies on the sub­ject¹, com­mis­sioned in 2017 by the funer­al ser­vices of the City of Par­is, estim­ated the car­bon emis­sions pro­duced by a single com­mit­tal at 833 kg of CO2. That’s the equi­val­ent of driv­ing a private car 4,000 km or pro­du­cing 741 litres of beer.

While more envir­on­ment­ally-friendly solu­tions are emer­ging for pay­ing trib­ute to the deceased, none has yet been leg­al­ised in France. There is “promes­sion”, a Swedish ini­ti­at­ive that is still in its infancy and as yet untested, which involves using extreme cold (a liquid nitro­gen bath) to freeze and then reduce the body to powder. Con­vers­ley, “aquam­a­tion” is a reverse tech­nique that dis­solves the body in an alkaline solu­tion at 93°C, before trans­form­ing the bones into powder. “This meth­od is leg­al in North Amer­ica,” explains the soci­olo­gist, “but its tech­nic­al effect­ive­ness has yet to be demonstrated.”

From one ele­ment to anoth­er, “ter­ram­a­tion” does not involve liquid pro­cesses, but con­sists of “return­ing the human body to a state of humus”. In oth­er words, human com­post­ing, which can take place on three dif­fer­ent levels. Firstly, on the ground, with a humus­a­tion pro­cess in which the corpse is placed on a bed of shred­ded mater­i­al, then covered with organ­ic mat­ter. Then above ground, as pro­posed by the Amer­ic­an com­pany Recom­pose, which decom­poses the body in cap­sules (“recom­pos­i­tion con­tain­ers”) and cre­ates com­post in a few weeks, which is giv­en to the fam­ily to “return to nature”, with the aim of revital­ising the soil. Lastly, there is a ground tech­nique, i.e. buri­al without a coffin, in a shroud and with shred­ding to activ­ate and regen­er­ate the soil. In this case, “we make some­thing new out of some­thing old”, explains Mar­tin Juli­er Costes, “because coffins were not com­puls­ory in France until the time of Napo­leon”.

For the research­er, who shares his thoughts and work on his per­son­al page², all these ini­ti­at­ives mobil­ise the ima­gin­a­tion of “gen­tle­ness, (…) nat­ur­al ele­ments and a return to the earth”. But their growth in pop­ular­ity is not only explained by the rise of eco­lo­gic­al aspir­a­tions in soci­ety. “Some people are tak­ing an interest in the des­tiny of their bod­ies by draw­ing inspir­a­tion from new spir­itu­al­it­ies, par­tic­u­larly those stem­ming from East­ern cur­rents such as Hinduism or Buddhism”. Their approach is motiv­ated by a cer­tain coher­ence between life, body, nature, and spir­it. The idea of return­ing to the earth is par­tic­u­larly present in the ter­ram­a­tion pro­cess, with the idea of “cre­at­ing a vir­tu­ous cycle between life and death, by regen­er­at­ing nature” after hav­ing lived in it for a while. “Oth­er men­tal frame­works are asso­ci­ated with this dynam­ic,” he con­tin­ues, “such as anim­al­ism, sham­an­ism, or the new philo­sophy of liv­ing beings espoused by intel­lec­tu­als such as Phil­ippe Descola or Bap­tiste Morizot”.

At the same time, the soci­olo­gist observes a grow­ing indi­vidu­al­isa­tion of social beha­viour, which would explain a “grow­ing trend towards per­son­al­ised funer­als”. This is a new way of stand­ing out from the crowd, by organ­ising “funer­als in one’s own image, out­side the tra­di­tion­al meth­ods of buri­al” that are too closely asso­ci­ated with dom­in­ant reli­gious or cul­tur­al dogmas.

While we await the leg­al­isa­tion of some of these envir­on­ment­ally-friendly funer­al rites, the first steps to be taken to reduce the envir­on­ment­al impact of our funer­als should be sought in cemeter­ies. French buri­al grounds are essen­tially gravel and min­er­als. “Buri­al with the con­struc­tion of a vault and the install­a­tion of a monu­ment, often impor­ted from South-East Asia, is equi­val­ent to the green­house gas emis­sions of more than 5 crema­tions” warns the City of Par­is funer­al ser­vices in their study.

Against this back­drop, we need to make the trans­ition from a field of tomb­stones to a garden of rest. “Our cemeter­ies are gradu­ally becom­ing green­er, land­scaped spaces,” observes Mar­tin Juli­er Costes, fol­low­ing the example of Père Lachaise in Par­is and oth­ers in Niort, Ver­sailles, Lyon and Gren­oble. Weasels, foxes and tawny owls roam freely along­side 140 oth­er anim­al spe­cies and “more than 220 wild plant spe­cies (…) observed between 2010 and 2020”, accord­ing to the Par­is City Council.

The recent “Liv­ing Cemeter­ies” study con­duc­ted by the Île-de-France Biod­iversity Agency shows that these areas have “an inter­est­ing capa­city to host biod­iversity”. Nev­er­the­less, they remain “heav­ily min­er­al­ised”, sug­gest­ing the need for a real green­ing policy? This would bene­fit both wild­life and res­id­ents (the urb­an green lung effect), as well as those who live there or aspire to do so in terms of eco­lo­gic­al accept­ab­il­ity. What remains to be done is to “get this trans­form­a­tion adop­ted by staff and cit­izens alike”, points out Mar­tin Juli­er Costes, who points out that more and more loc­al author­it­ies are “tak­ing a polit­ic­al approach to the green­ing of the funer­al industry”, as is the case in Lyon.

This is not the full pic­ture, and there are still gaps in the ana­lys­is of the eco­lo­gic­al foot­print of funer­als. “There is, for example, no sol­id study com­bin­ing bio­logy, hydro­logy and chem­istry to exam­ine the envir­on­ment­al impact of buri­al and crema­tion on the soil, the air or the water cycle, or on thanato­praxy and the asso­ci­ated care”, notes the soci­olo­gist. The study com­mis­sioned by the Par­is funer­al ser­vices “is inter­est­ing, from his point of view, but still insufficient”.

He there­fore calls on the pub­lic author­it­ies to take up the issue, to object­iv­ise this envir­on­ment­al impact, and take the neces­sary meas­ures to make the funer­al industry green­er, and tomor­row – per­haps – we could curl up in a plant cocoon and let the soil take care of our buri­al. Naturally?

Samuel Belaud