Alternative Funeral Monitor

NYT - Into the Great Green Beyond

June 30, 2010, 8:31 am - NEW YORK TIMES

Into the Great Green Beyond

By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF

At the end of an eco-conscious life, there is a final choice a person can make to limit his or her impact on the planet: a green funeral.

“Consumers might live green, but they don’t think about dying green,” said Darren Crouch, president of Passages International, with offices in Albuquerque, N.M., and Berkshire, England, which supplies funeral homes with environmentally friendly caskets and urns. “They don’t know that they can green their funeral.”

Of the more than 2.4 million deaths per year in the United States, roughly 70 percent of the newly departed are interred in traditional caskets — that is, wood, steel or even copper caskets, many of which are then encased in slabs of reinforced concrete to prevent the weight of the earth from causing them to collapse. For those who go the casket route, embalming with toxic chemicals like formaldehyde remains common.

Bonner Springs High School students build, donate infant caskets - KansasCity.com

The erratic buzz of saws reverberates through the Bonner Springs High School wood shop weeks after school let out.

via www.kansascity.com

The smell and taste of fine pine dust lingers in the air. And teacher Kris Munsch can’t help but smile with satisfaction while watching his students gently handle the lumber.

The summer project isn’t like the chip-and-dip platters or nightstands they crafted during the school year. The teenagers are transforming wood into pine caskets for infants.

Having lost his teenage son almost five years ago, Munsch has never hesitated to talk to his students about life and death. So when he heard about families who couldn’t afford a casket for their deceased newborns, Munsch shared it with some students.

America's first National Pagan Burial Ground

Circle Cemetery
America’s First National Pagan Burial Ground
Preserving Nature & Greening the End of Life
(608) 924-2216 * circle@circlesanctuary.org


Circle Cemetery is located at Circle Sanctuary Nature Preserve, just north of Barneveld, Wisconsin, about 25 miles west of Madison near Blue Mound State Park. Founded in 1995, Circle Cemetery is the first National Pagan Burial Ground and one of the first exclusively "Green" or Conservation Cemeteries in the United States. Conservation cemeteries are as the name implies – cemeteries situated in preserved natural areas. They usually include places for cremains as well as sites for Green burials. Green burial is returning a non-embalmed body to the earth in a natural, biodegradable container.