Green burials are throwbacks to the days when people were interred in shrouds or in pine boxes. Very biodegradable. Very good for the environment. Very inexpensive.
Green burials aren't offered everywhere, but more and more funeral directors are greening up, industry officials say.
Basically the posthumous preparation involves not using toxic chemicals such as embalming fluids or other hazardous materials. Non-biodegradable materials, such as metal caskets or concrete burial vaults, are not used in green burials, either. At true green burials, the grave is dug by hand, not a piece of heavy equipment burning fossil fuels.
According to the New Mexico-based Green Burials Council, such services are a return to basics.
"Green burial uses less energy and creates less waste than conventional burial," the council's website says. "It's essentially the way most of humanity cared for its dead for thousands of years up until the late 19th century."
Joe Sehee, Green Burials Council executive director, cited recent polls showing that green burials are increasing across the nation, although some pockets - including Florida - appear to be lagging behind the trend.
An AARP poll in 2007 showed that just over 20 percent of those surveyed favored green burials, Sehee said.
"This is not a fringe market," Sehee said. Two factors figure into the mix, he said: legacy and environmental conservation. The baby boomer generation is responsible for the green burial upsurge, he said.
"This is the generation that gave us Earth Day," he said. "It has transformed cultural milestones. It doesn't do things the way their parents did them."
Florida is a place people retire to late in life. They may have burial plots in other states, and transporting an un-embalmed body over great distances poses an obstacle to green burials, he said.
As other states begin to accept the green burial idea - bringing the nation in line with most of the world - green burials one day will be the norm, Sehee said.
"We are trying to move this into the mainstream," he said.
Concerns about un-embalmed bodies and groundwater pollution are unfounded, he said. More pollution is caused by toxic paint on caskets or vaults that leak embalming fluids into the ground, he said.
Plus, he said, green burials are cheaper; maybe not as cheap as cremation, but a lot less expensive than conventional funerals in which bodies are embalmed and buried in pricey metal caskets.
Consequently, some funeral homes are resistant to the idea, Sehee said. Old-school funeral directors see green burials as a threat to their income of green.
"The knee-jerk reaction is that this is disruptive to their business, that it will diminish their conventional offerings," he said. "We say they need to prepare to serve these families or someone else will."
Existing cemeteries need only a conditional use permit to allow green burials, he said. Elsewhere in the nation, green burials are taking place in nature preserves and large tracts of land in a natural state. In Florida, there is only one such tract, and that's in the northern part of the state, said Bill Schichtel, funeral director at Heath Funeral Chapel in Lakeland, one of a handful of local funeral homes that offer the service.
Green burials have not quite caught on, Schichtel said.
The main obstacle is a lack of fully green cemeteries in the area, he said. A cemetery in Dunedin offers green burial plots, but only on a portion of the overall tract, he said. The nearest fully green cemetery is in the Panhandle, on a nature preserve, he said.
Once land is designated locally as a green cemetery, call for those services will pick up, Schichtel said.
"We're getting ready," he said. "There's not been a call for it yet, it's still in the early stages."
He said he decided to offer the service after a family friend interviewed him about green burials for a college term paper.
"I thought, maybe we should be more proactive," he said. "We just started doing it just a couple of months, maybe three four months ago."
While the cost of green burials may be lower than a typical funeral, it is offset by other factors, he said.
In a true green burial, he said, no motorized equipment is used, so graves are dug by hand.
"To be truly green," he said, "you wouldn't have a backhoe with gasoline digging the grave."
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