Our editor, Angela Finney, may be feeling a little mortal…
Now I don’t know about the rest of you but I am not planning on popping my clogs for a good while yet. When I do I might be happy to be buried deep in a compost heap at the Teralba worm farm along with the road kill or under a tree at the bottom of the garden. Don’t laugh… lack of burial space and the environmentally-unfriendly aspects of cremation and interment are going to be influencing the last decision we ever make. Once you read this article you might change your mind too.
I have drawn on three programs run during 2008 on the ABC: ‘Background Briefing’ on July 20th, the ‘Science Show’ on May 17th and the ‘New Inventors’ on April 9th. I can honestly say that until I heard these discussions I had assumed that cremation was alright but now I have to change my will so that I don’t produce even more CO2 emissions in death.
The New Inventors, April 9th 2008
Kevin Hartley a funeral director from Adelaide has invented a special coffin that is only used to transport a body to the interment site. He is exploiting a loophole in the law that requires a body to be transported to the burial site in a coffin but it doesn’t say that the body has to buried in it. “Death itself is unpredictable but how you’d like to be buried is generally up to you. Personally I don’t want to be put in a coffin. I’d like to have a natural earth burial so my shrouded body can decompose naturally into the soil. But some may be uncomfortable looking at a shrouded body during the service. And to be moved from one place to another the deceased needs to be lawfully in a sealed container.
“So ‘the Transporter’ has been designed to carry a shrouded body and gently place it directly into the grave. It does everything a coffin does but it comes with a hinged base. Once at the burial site it is placed on a specially designed lowering device, and three steel pins are removed from the sides. This unlocks the two bottom panels so that when the lowering device is activated the weight of the body pushes through the base and is gently lowered on a stretcher to its final resting place. It is unobtrusive and subtle and I get to be left where I want to be, in a forest of souls”.
The Science Show, May 17th 2008: Natural burial
Robyn Williams interviews Roger Short from the Faculty of Medicine, Melbourne University who came up with a similar idea and actually refers to Kevin Hartley during the discussion. This is a transcript:
Robyn Williams: Do you recall that most unexpected angle on global warming and CO2 production that hit the headlines a few weeks ago? The downside of cremation. Even when you cark it it seems you need to stay green. There have been developments. Here’s Professor Roger Short of the University of Melbourne who first suggested we should get buried, not burned, in a cardboard box, vertically under a tree.
Your suggestion, just to remind us, of when I cark it, you don’t want me to be cremated. Why not?
Roger Short: Because you produce so much CO2 and you don’t want your last emission to be a massive contribution of CO2 to the already overloaded atmosphere.
Robyn Williams: So it’s a serious contribution, is it?
Roger Short: Yes. The latest estimates from a colleague in Adelaide are that if you are cremated in your coffin, you produce 160 kilograms of CO2, which is a staggering amount.
Robyn Williams: Yes, it is rather. And so your suggestion otherwise a few months ago was that we have cardboard coffins and we be buried upright. Has that been taken further?
Roger Short: Yes, the reaction to not having a wooden coffin which is buried with you is very positive, people think that’s silly. Some people don’t like the idea of vertical burial, they would rather be horizontal, but the idea of being in a sheet or a biodegradable cloth is very acceptable to people, and indeed this won a prize on the ABC’s New Inventors program just two weeks ago when the idea was launched by a funeral director in Adelaide. And it’s interesting that Adelaide and South Australia was where cremation was first started in Australia back in the very early 1900s, and Adelaide and we hope South Australia is now looking to try and be the first state in Australia that bans cremation on ecological grounds.
Robyn Williams: It must have been chuffing for you to have someone in a practical sense follow up what was your idea. Was he inspired directly by you?
Roger Short: No, interestingly he hadn’t heard of me at all until people started ringing him up after his program on The New Inventors saying had he heard about me, and then he looked me up on the internet and we found that we were singing the same song. But of course he’s got the practical contact with the industry, and to have him within the industry saying, ‘Hey, cremation is crazy,’ is just enormously powerful.
Robyn Williams: And what’s his particular suggestion?
Roger Short: He would like to have some ecological burial in the countryside, a memorial forest, where you could be buried maybe next to a tree. We’ve done some calculations which show that one tree in 100 years will sequester from the atmosphere more than a metric tonne of CO2 and turn it into wood. So where do you think the phrase comes from; ‘touch wood’?
Robyn Williams: Really?
Roger Short: Yes. We’ve just researched it and it goes back into pagan times, it’s one of the oldest phrases we know of because your ancestors and the spirits were connected to wood, and so we’re just talking about back to wood.
Robyn Williams: And my body mouldering there in the upright grave would actually produce stuff that would get into the tree.
Roger Short: Yes, all the CO2 that you’re carrying around in your tissues ends up as wood.
Robyn Williams: That’s rather satisfying.
Roger Short: Isn’t it lovely.
Robyn Williams: Yes, but not yet. Professor Roger Short at the University of Melbourne; a lateral thinker if ever there was one, but not in the grave.
Background Briefing, July 20th 2008: Bury, burn or compost?
The following is condensed from the programme presented by Ian Townsend but if you want to read it in full go to http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2008/2306409.htm. Roger Short and Kevin Hartley are again featured.
Evelyn Green died in a Ballina nursing home at the age off 97. She came from a traditional farming family but her choice of burial was far more ‘new age’. The coffin was made from pine board by her son-in-law John Gough. “There was nothing galvanised, no plastic, no nothing in it. It will just rot away I suppose you could say, like the earth. Her funeral in a simple coffin in the bush made a lot of people happy”. The coffin was buried under a tree in a new section of the Lismore Cemetery set aside for natural burials with a magnet so the grave can be found later with a metal detector. The co-ordinates were recorded so that it can be found using GPS.
The management of Centennial Park, the largest cemetery in Adelaide, takes a modern approach to the availability of space: it limits the tenure of its graves. “Instead of buying a grave, you buy a licence for 50 years. Your family can renew it, but if you live and die in South Australia, or Western Australia for that matter, resting in peace isn’t guaranteed. In many cemeteries there’s a good chance you can be dug up again in a process the industry calls ‘lift and deepen’” says Bryan Elliott, the CEO. “On the eastern seaboard where perpetuity, that is, you buy a licence and it’s forever, is causing challenges. New cemeteries are having to be established further and further out from the city. Which have to compete against developers for housing etc., so the more and more that happens, the dearer and dearer it’s going to be for burial. Hence in some regards, options such as cremation are going to become more popular potentially, because of cost.” He goes on to explain that they cremate ten people every day which, along with selling memorials, is big business.
When it was established in 1936 Centennial Park was cutting edge in cemetery design. No headstone is higher than a metre. All headstones are set on concrete beams so the grass on the graves can be mowed. And because of its licence system, it will be a long time before it’s full. When you wander around today you see blue stickers, a bit like parking tickets, on the headstones of licensees whose time has expired. ‘This position is now due for renewal’, they say. ‘Please contact the office.’ If a family doesn’t contact the office within two years, the site can be re-used. The headstone is photographed, removed from the cemetery and broken up. The management of Centennial Park is also concerned about the carbon footprint created by cremation and burial so they commissioned a report. “A cremation generates 160 kilos of CO2. On the day of a burial we generate 39 kilos of CO2, so on the day the CO2 emissions are one quarter for a burial. Over the long term of the licence for a burial, the environmental impact of a burial is in actual fact higher long term, than a cremation, and that is because of the maintenance factor in a cemetery like Centennial Park, where we mow and go back over the 50 years of the licence, and all of that labour cost, etc., has got an environmental footprint as well “ says Kevin Hartley.
Kevin Hartley has been in the funeral business for 25 years and since January 2008 has been burying people in biodegradable shrouds. “When you think about it, if you bury a body in a medium-depth grave, not shallow, not six foot in the ground necessarily, you’re burying it at a point where it will actually decompose naturally. Quite the contrary if you put a body in a plastic lined box where the decomposition naturally is limited by the barrier of the plastic, what in fact you get—and it’s a terrible term—it’s putrefaction; it’s rotting. Because not only is it sealed in a box but at a six foot depth you’re down through the zone where you’re into an anaerobic area. So you’ve got a situation, I would suspect that from a health point of view or a bacteria point of view, you’d actually have a much worse problem sealed away in that six foot down plastic-lined one-room apartment under the ground, than you ever would by returning that body directly into the ground where it could decompose naturally.
“The choice of a natural earth burial was an emotional one for me because I’d run a crematorium, and without going into the details, I’d never be cremated, it’s just unpleasant. It’s violent, it’s unnecessary. And I hate the idea of being buried in a box. I’ve seen the results and looked at the insides of coffins and thought, wow, why would you put a person inside a plastic-lined box? They’re not going to decompose. So I got to the idea of a natural earth burial via an emotional route. But once I get there, I then see the environmental benefit of it.”
Kevin Hartley is planning a bush cemetery on a hill outside Adelaide where one day 30,000 people will be buried, each one fertilising a tree planted next to it. There are already bush cemeteries at Lismore and Kingston, Tasmania but neither is as large as the one Kevin is planning. The study commissioned by Centennial Park has also shown that natural earth burial is a bit more carbon friendly. If a cemetery is just bush with no grass to mow, where burial’s cheap and carbon can be offset by planting trees, then it might even be possible to make money, or at least avoid an everlasting cost for mowing the lawn and watering the roses.
In Queensland, Phil Connolly Newhaven Funerals. “I’ve just been to a conference in America and it was almost dominated by presenters who made presentations that were all leaning and slanted towards eco. One of those presenters was a cremator manufacturer who’s invented a gadget that for $10,000 you can put on every cremator, and it creates a less of a carbon footprint. Even though the cremation process really doesn’t do a lot of harm to the environment, it does some. And if you can be seen to be doing less, well people perhaps would like it more. And more and more people are getting into the green environment, so to speak.”
Once we start paying for carbon emissions the cost of cremations will increase so we are all going to have to consider alternatives.
There’s a lot more choice if you’re willing to read the laws and do the paperwork yourself.
Melbourne barrister and author, Robert Larkins says you can arrange a funeral without going to a funeral director. “Firstly it’s amazing how much control we have. If someone dies at home, you can keep the body at home, and you can build your own coffin. It’s not a problem. You can take the body to the cemetery in the back of a 4-wheel-drive, it’s just that people aren’t aware of it. So I think awareness is the first thing. And there’s been a recent parliamentary inquiry in both New South Wales and Victoria, and both those inquiries made it fairly clear that they didn’t want to impose legislation that stopped those sorts of freedoms about people looking after a burial themselves. So there are surprisingly few legislative stumbling blocks. There are some anomalies, like the notion of having to be buried in a coffin, but most of the legislation says things like the body has to be taken to the cemetery in a coffin, and transported around the cemetery in a coffin. But often there’s a loophole. This is the one the Muslims used, it didn’t actually say that it had to be put in the ground in a coffin.”
Professor Roger Short: “Three years ago I had decided that I was definitely going to be cremated, and my ashes were going to be sprinkled from the highest mountain in the Inner Hebrides, a mountain called Halival in a south-westerly gale so that my ashes would be sprinkled over the rest of Scotland, and that made me feel really good. And now I realise that it was just infantile, childish and idiotic. No way would I make my last emission 150 kilograms of CO2 to contaminate the world. The best thing to do with your body, when you’ve died, is to commit it back to the earth and if you could plant some trees around your corpse, you’re perfect blood and bonemeal, and you could generate a memorial forest because we’ve done some calculations which show that one tree will sequester from the atmosphere one tonne of carbon dioxide every 100 years of its life.”
Kevin Hartley adds this: “It’s cheaper to cremate a body than it is to bury it. You think about that. You’ve got to put it in a coffin, take it to a specially built crematorium where they’ve got a furnace or a number of furnaces with may cost up to $250,000 each, you’ve got to pump fossil fuel into the furnace to raise it up to about 800 degrees C, you’ve got to have staff who are trained to do this. You’ve actually got to put the body through an industrial process and deal with the ashes. All of that costs less than to simply dig a hole and pop a person in it. That doesn’t really seem sane. Why is it cheaper to be cremated? It’s being subsidised by cheap fossil fuel and by the environment.”
The attraction of cremation has been that it’s cheaper than traditional burials. If the price goes up, people might not buy it. So funeral directors are looking for something that’s as convenient as cremation and as cheap. So far two methods are being considered, both macabre. In one, the body is snap frozen in nitrogen and then shattered with sound waves, freeze dried and turned into dust. It’s like cremation without burning. The other method involves dissolving bodies in an alkaline solution, breaking them down into a calcium dust which you can keep or scatter, and a liquid. It has been suggested that the 300 litres of liquid left over from the process be used as fertiliser. Phil Connolly has developed a new technique with the help of a scientist: “I can’t tell you too much about it, because it’s subject to a patent being processed, but it will be a mixture of cremation and burial in that the final product will be able to be used as perhaps irrigation or be put back into the ecology and do some good. And the process is not a fire or anything, it’s just a natural reduction, but really just speeds up the composting process to about 12 hours instead of six months.”
So there you are. As organic gardeners we should all make the ultimate gesture: become part of our gardens!