Families seek green alternatives to traditional funerals

The Old Chapel at Lambeth Cemetery in Tooting, south London, sums up what Poppy Mardall — founder of Poppy’s funeral directors — hopes to change about death. On one wall of the chapel, which Poppy’s uses as a mortuary, are two-metre-high fridges for bodies awaiting funerals. And, in another corner, are piles of coffins, heavily skewed towards models using fast-growing willow, cardboard and other low-carbon, biodegradable materials.

The mortuary’s location, just steps from the company’s offices in the cemetery’s old gatehouse, differentiates Poppy’s from mainstream, high street funeral directors, Mardall says. She hopes the proximity of people who have died will focus staff’s minds on clients’ needs. Mainstream operations, which store corpses in large service centres on industrial estates, do that far less, Mardall argues.

She also wants to wean customers off a default reliance on funeral practices that cause unnecessary environmental damage.

Her business is part of a growing movement across the developed world to clean up carbon-intensive, often polluting, ceremonies. It seeks to encourage the use of less wasteful coffins and to move away from practices such as embalming — which uses formaldehyde to slow decomposition. Greener funeral directors also often advise shallow burials in “natural” burial grounds over cremation or burials in traditional cemeteries’ deep plots.

“I think we’re remembering a way of dealing with our dead that’s less clinical,” Mardall says. “As a funeral director, I think our responsibility is to support the innovation of practices that are gentle on the planet.”

However, Louise Winter, founder of another non-traditional funeral directors, Poetic Endings, stresses the imperative of avoiding distress for grieving families.

“People behave very conservatively around death and funerals,” she notes at Poetic Endings’ office in Forest Hill, south London. “There may be community- and faith-based decisions they’re making, which means they choose something that isn’t necessarily green.”

According to a report by Planet Mark, an environmental consultancy, the average UK funeral emits around 400kg of carbon dioxide equivalent — the same amount that would be generated by charging 48,000 smartphones. Much of that comes from cremation, which accounted for 79 per cent of UK committals in 2020. A natural gas cremation releases around 126kg of carbon dioxide.

Mardall says families choose green funerals because of the better environmental legacy and because they may better reflect how the deceased person lived. “That’s reassuring for the people who are grieving,” Mardall says. “We’ve all had that experience of being at someone’s funeral and thinking, ‘This just isn’t who he was’.”

Winter agrees that her clients want to reflect a dead person’s values. “People will come here and talk about how they don’t want their person to be a negative impact on the environment,” she says. “They want them to return to the earth.”

Many people who want an environmentally friendly funeral seek a natural burial, sometimes called a woodland burial. The cemeteries used — which range from simple fields on farms, to sites with buildings for ceremonies and receptions — typically bar non-biodegradable items in the grave or memorials. And the shallow burials encourage quicker decomposition.

One of the newest such sites in the UK is Sewardstone Park Cemetery near Chingford, on the border between London and Essex. Russell Tomkins, the cemetery’s managing director, says the venture is seeking to establish a “one-stop-shop” for green funerals, including buildings for funeral ceremonies and receptions, an electric crematorium, and a solar farm to provide clean electricity.

Just as many people are choosing now the best choice for the environment regarding a coffin as the worst

But the lack of stone memorials deters some potential clients, he says. “People automatically have in their head that they want these big stone monuments, so the site isn’t for everybody,” Tomkins admits. “But I think, once people actually come to the site and see it, they do change their mind.”

He positions Sewardstone Park — which includes a dedicated area for Islamic burials, alongside a conventional natural burial area — between the strictest, most austere natural burial grounds and a traditional, inner-city cemetery.

“We’re a stepping stone on the way to a full natural burial, biodegradable setting,” he suggests.

Winter says that, as well as seeking a low-impact committal, families can also choose to minimise the environmental costs of funeral travel. “You don’t have to have funeral limousines,” Winter says. “You don’t have to have a big procession. If you’re going to have lots of people attending the funeral, you might consider hiring a minibus.”

Mardall says she has encouraged customers to choose a lower-carbon “timber-effect” coffin over more carbon-intensive alternatives simply by putting it first on the company’s catalogue on its website.

“Just as many people are choosing now the best choice for the environment regarding a coffin as the worst,” she says. “That has changed in a year or two.”

New committal options may change the landscape still further. One is an equivalent of cremation known as alkaline hydrolysis, which dissolves the body, leaving ash. It uses around a quarter of the energy of a gas cremation. Mardall describes the development as “exciting”.

That’s the tricky position I’m in — trying to reduce the impact of the [funeral] items whilst also respecting bereaved people’s wishes

Meanwhile, Recompose, a funeral home in the US state of Washington, has pioneered “human composting”: turning a body into fertile soil over the course of five to seven weeks. Mardall has visited Seattle to investigate the method.

She points out that it is currently expensive, at $7,000 a body, but adds: “I hope lots of people choose it because it’s beautiful.”

Winter sums up the challenges of promoting better funeral practices by recalling that some families ask to have mourners each release a balloon at the end of a ceremony. While sympathising with grieving families, she has decided the practice’s effects on wildlife are too serious to offer it. “That’s the sort of tricky position I’m in — trying to reduce the impact of the items whilst also respecting bereaved people’s wishes,” she says.

Mardall, meanwhile, regrets that mainstream funeral directors remain “very traditional and quite inflexible” and skewed towards environmentally unfriendly practices.

She expresses hope, however, that the spread of alternatives might change that. “If we decide to start making positive green choices as a society, that will start influencing other people to make positive green choices,” Mardall predicts. “It will become normal to do what’s right when someone dies.”