Green Burial Basics

The what, why & how of green burial. Plus a little history..

What is green burial?

The GREEN BURIAL COUNCIL defines green burial as, “A way of caring for the dead with minimal environmental impact that aids in the conservation of natural resources, reduction of carbon emissions, protection of worker health, and the restoration and/or preservation of habitat. “

At Green Renewal Caskets, we think of green burial as a gift of nourishment to the earth, made readily available so that plants and animals may thrive, contributing to the health and resiliency of our beautiful planet and for the benefit of all living things.

Those leading the green burial movement along with us here at GRC, believe that green burial is not about strict rules or exclusion. We encourage any “shade of green” and recognize that folks making these very personal decisions will have diverse values and circumstances that may or may not allow for a fully green burial or funeral. With that in mind, the following 3 tenets are generally accepted as the cornerstones for green burial.

*A Burial Vault Is Not Used. Also called an outer burial container, this is a concrete, metal or plastic surround that a casket is placed into. It is used, and sometimes required, by cemeteries to prevent grave settling for easier grounds maintenance.

*The Body Is Not Embalmed. Instead of chemicals, refrigeration is routinely used to preserve the body until the time of interment. Michigan is one of a few states that does not yet recognize refrigeration as a viable method of preservation, so funeral directors are required to embalm a body in their care if it is not interred within 48 hours. These rules apply only to funeral directors and do not mean embalming is required in Michigan. For home funerals, bodies may be kept cool with any method the family deems appropriate. Dry ice is commonly used, but regular ice or even air conditioning can be sufficient.

*The Deceased Is Buried In A Biodegradable Casket Or Shroud. These should be made of organic materials that will decompose naturally and support life in the surrounding soil. View our Back-To-Earth Casket

Green Burial Photos From Around The USA

If you have a green burial story or photos that you would like to share with the community, please email us. We would love to provide a platform for others to learn from and be inspired by your experience.

Why choose green burial?

You may have inferred that green burial is better for the environment. Consider this statistical imagery for one year’s worth of conventional burials.

we bury enough embalming fluid to fill eight Olympic-sized swimming pools, enough metal to build the Golden Gate Bridge, and so much reinforced concrete in burial vaults that we could build a two lane highway from New York to Detroit.

Joe Sehee, founder of The Green Burial Council

In addition to being an enormous waste of resources, this toxic blow to our burial grounds and surrounding areas hampers the plants and animals(including humans) that live there. How ironic that we’ve found a way to pollute even in death, when nature has spent billions of years designing the demise of all creatures for the opposite purpose, earth’s nourishment.

Intertwined with the green burial movement is the idea that more involvement from family and loved ones leads to healthier healing and more fulfilling rituals. As much as green burial is about the environment, it is also about changing our mindset around death so that the living may gain solace and peace. In green burial, we are empowered to perform the sacred duty of caring for our loved one after death and honoring death as an important transition in the continuum of life. We highly recommend the documentary, A Will for the Woods, for an in-depth and moving look at one family’s journey with green burial.

People often express humility in their end-of-life wishes. The plain pine box is a symbol of practicality and reverence for something larger than oneself. Our death does not need to saddle our families with financial burden, or see their inheritance wasted. Green burial shines here, as it is quite possible to have a beautiful and moving earthly departure for relatively little money. Costs are further explored in  FAQ / Pre-Planning

How to have a green burial?

Here are the basic steps to planning a green burial. 

1. Find a cemetery with green burial plots available. Or prepare for a backyard burial. Here is a list of local cemeteries with contact information for the cemetery sexton and tips for questions to ask. If you are interested in a backyard burial, prepare for a process and contact your local zoning board for direction on how to create a family cemetery.
2. Purchase or make a biodegradable casket or shroud. These will be made of natural materials, including wood, weaved branches or fibers, linen, silk, or even cardboard. You’ll want to confirm that any item you purchase is made without toxic finishes, glues, dies, or synthetic parts. GRC caskets are all produced in accordance with these green burial standards. 
3. Think about your preferences and write out a plan. Who will carry out this plan? What stipulations do you have for the burial, the funeral, the ceremonies? What is important to you? How do you want your funeral/burial to look and feel? Who should be invited? You may want to take some time to learn about what others have done before making your own plans. For help, go to: Pre-Planning  and  Books | Videos | Podcasts
4. Choose a Funeral Director. Michigan is one of a few states that require a funeral director to file the death certificate and oversee disposition. This does not mean that you can’t have a family-led home funeral and/or green burial in Michigan. You can. You will just need to hire a funeral director to help with certain aspects. Ask for their “GPL” or general price list, which has itemized costs for all goods and services. Explain your wishes and choose someone who is willing to help you fulfil your vision. See homefuneralalliance.org/state-requirements.html for more info on requirements by state. Find local funeral homes and their contact info on our resources page: Funeral Homes

What is the history of green burial?

Today’s green burial movement started with the world-wide grassroots efforts of individual morticians, journalists, cemetery sextons, conservationists, funeral directors, religious leaders, and passionate regular folks who, for one reason or another, couldn’t help but feel that something was lacking in the modern way of death rites. At the heart of the problem was the fact that as a society, we had lost the ability to care for our dead with our own loving hands. In 2005, The Green Burial Council was formed, the movement solidified, and control over our dead, our rituals, our burial grounds and our grief is slowly coming back to those brave enough to take it on. At the start of 2021, there were 300+ green burial cemeteries in the United States and Canada. A vast array of green funeral related products are now widely available and polls show that most Americans are open to considering a green funeral or burial. You could say that the times are changing. Or perhaps we’ve realized that some things are so basic, so vital to what it means to be human, that they were never meant to be changed at all.

***For an abbreviated history lesson, scroll to the infographic at the bottom. Otherwise, please read on.

Way back when…

Most burials in human history would qualify as “green burials”. There is even evidence that hundreds of thousands of years ago Neanderthals and other early hominids buried their dead in simple graves, sometimes even scattered with flowers. This makes the cultural practice of burial one of our earliest known human rituals. Such deep roots may explain why for many of us a natural burial feels instinctual.

Why did we start embalming people in the first place?

In the United States today, embalming is more common than anywhere else in the world. Roughly 50% of Americans choose to be embalmed when they die even though the historical circumstances that prompted embalming have all but vanished.

In the United States before the Civil War, most folks were buried naturally in an unfinished wooden box or a cloth shroud at the local church graveyard or on the property where they lived. When the war hit and huge numbers of soldiers died on the battlefield, the problem of what to do with the bodies was taken on by a new group of entrepreneurs. Field embalmers used methods adapted from the ancient Egyptian practice of mummification which involved removing all moisture, organs and blood and filling the body with linen or sand. Instead of removing organs, rudimentary field embalming simply replaced the body’s blood with preservative, commonly arsenic, mercury, and formaldehyde. Wealthy families could pay to have the bodies of their deceased soldiers shipped after being embalmed in hopes of preventing decay on the long and sometimes hot train ride home. Just as the war was ending in 1865, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. His body was embalmed and sent on a 3 week open casket funerary procession from Washington DC to Springfield, IL, stopping at cities and towns along the way for mourners to catch a glimpse of their preserved president. Embalming had entered the mainstream, and the funeral industry was born.

So, what happened to the humble pine box?

Concrete burial vaults, invented in 1880, and metal locking caskets were also products of Civil War era thinking. Vaults and secure caskets did offer families protection against grave robbing, which for a time was a real concern, but the bigger concern driving American death practices was the growing denial and fear of our own mortality. By the mid 1800’s, urban church graveyards had become crowded and a lack of scientific understanding led to fears that dead bodies were the cause of epidemics, like smallpox and measles (This is not the case. See the WHO website for the current science and peace of mind). These fears spurred the government to mandate rural burial parks built outside of the city limits to keep the dead separated from the living. Though early cemeteries were modeled after English gardens and intended to offer a peaceful resting place in nature, by the late 1800’s they had become standardized, gridded and driven by fear -made to “protect” the interred from the inevitable. Concrete vaults were advertised as figurative and literal barriers from the forces of nature and decay. Furniture makers began selling reinforced metal caskets with locks, falsely claiming air and water tight seals and promising eternal corpse protection from robbers, bugs and germs. Compounding our innate fear of death was an effective sales strategy for casket and vault sellers, but there is also a practical reason for requiring vaults with each burial plot. A vault prevents a grave from settling as the casket decomposes. Cemetery grounds crews quickly realized that keeping a manicured lawn was much easier when vaults were used. And so, in the name of efficiency, the vault was widely adopted. Vaults and metal caskets are standard practice in conventional cemeteries today, but folks around the world are questioning the environmental toll. The Green Burial Council offers statistics estimating that each year in the United States 1.6 million tons of concrete is used for making vaults. We then proceed to bury it in the ground, preventing the natural biome from doing its work- returning us to the soil.

For all we have done in the last 150 years to push death out of our sight, to clean it up, and try to escape it’s effects, death persists as the place we are all headed. Green burial asks us to acknowledge this fact, prepare for it as best we can, and build rituals within our communities to ease the emotional burden and heal the land that has fallen victim to our folly. We may even go so far as to allocate our demise for the preservation of natural habitat, and for the benefit of all creatures in the grand cycle of life on Earth.

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