Going green is taking on new meaning with a more environmentally conscious approach to life's last rite of passage. Greening a funeral really means doing things the old fashioned way, says Larry Click, funeral director for Click Funeral Homes in Lenoir City and Farragut, the state's first certified funeral home through the Green Burial Council, a nonprofit organization that promotes environmentally conscious burial practices.
Click is among approximately 300 funeral homes, cemeteries and related businesses across the country that have received Green Burial Council certification.
To obtain certification, funeral homes must offer sustainable options to their customers, including refrigeration or nontoxic embalming and eco-friendly caskets and urns - Click offers natural, wood caskets made in nearby Bean Station - as well as options such as at-home viewings.
"I think this really is just going back to the way we used to do things," Click said. "I've been in a funeral home my whole life. Used to, when somebody would pass away we'd go put a tent up in the cemetery because people were digging graves by hand. My daddy told me that when we first started, the cloth-covered caskets were all they had back then."
Click learned of environmentally friendly funerals a few years ago, and because the family-owned company already performs a variety of funerals, he thought it would be good to add green services to the list of options.
A green burial can include anything from delivering a shrouded body directly into the ground from the hospital to performing a more traditional kind of funeral with sustainable products. In addition to the wood coffins, made without any type of finish, Click offers shrouds made from natural materials; guest books and note cards made of post-consumer recycled paper and natural body washes as an alternative to embalming.
Click also has developed relationships with several cemeteries in order to allow burials without vault or casket. And a family can choose both to dig the grave and cover the casket themselves - although Click said that option has less to do with environmental considerations than creating a certain type of experience for friends and family of the deceased.
Going green isn't a huge leap for Click, he said, because the funeral home already is accustomed to nontraditional types of East Tennessee funerals, including Jewish services, with a simple wooden casket and no embalming; and Muslim services, with no casket and no vault. Cremation also has become more common - Click estimates 90 percent of customers from the large retirement community of Tellico Village in Loudon pick this alternative.
"I think we're just exposed to so many different types of services, it's given us some insight into these things," he said.
Going green can be cheaper than traditional burial as well. A traditional funeral, including a church or funeral home chapel service, costs about $6,000, Click said. A direct burial, with natural casket, costs about $3,000. In the green funerals Click has conducted so far, families have elected to hold graveside services only, although Click said he expects that may change as more people opt to go with a natural alternative. If a family chooses to bury their loved one in simply a shroud, direct burial costs about $1,900 - the cost of the cemetery plot and grave-digging excluded - equivalent to the price of cremation.
The funeral home has conducted several green funerals so far, he said.
"I think (customers) want something more simple, and some people want something more natural," he said. "They just like this idea of going back to the earth."
It's not yet a booming business, however, Click noted.
"I think it'll be something that's going to evolve slowly," he said.
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