Mushroom Suits for Greener Funeral Options
Many people are looking to step away from traditional funeral services like embalming, casket burials, and cremations. One of the main reasons is because they want to lessen their effect on the environment. A surprisingly large number of people are searching for sustainable alternatives for laying themselves or their loved ones to rest. One of the newest options for a green burial happens to be the mushroom suit, and it is recently growing in popularity because Luke Perry chose to be buried in one.
The biodegradable mushroom suit from Coeio.com will help decompose a body and return its nutrients back into the earth. The self-recycling organic cotton suit also comes in a shroud style. This suit is infused with a biomix of mushroom mycelium and other microorganisms that work to speed decomposition, neutralize toxins in our bodies and transfer nutrients back into the environment. This suit takes our remains and turns them into new life.
Jae Rhim Lee is the founder of Coeio and is an MIT graduate. She introduced her $1500 mushroom suit, now known as an Infinity Suit, by wearing it to a 2008 fashion show held at the Museum of Science in Boston. She then held a TED talk in 2011 discussing her new Infinity Suit. Her TED talk has been viewed worldwide over 1.5 million times. This helps to show us how popular her suit is and how many people are interested in finding new ways to have a greener funeral.
One of the biggest problems in deathcare is that when people die, we kill the planet with us. In the US burials account for nearly 4.3 million gallons of embalming fluid a year, and 827,060 gallons of that belongs to methanol, benzene, and formaldehyde. These chemicals can wreak havoc on the environment. On top of these chemicals, caskets and vaults use 20 million feet of hardwoods (rainforests woods included), 17,000 tons of copper and bronze and 64,500 tons of steel. All of these are poured into our environment and can lead to copper, iron, cobalt, lead, and zinc being leached into the ground.
Some may think that cremation is better, but it also has its own environmental drawbacks. The process uses loads of fossil fuel to burn the body to ash. It is estimated that it takes the same amount of fuel to burn one body as it takes a car to drive 4800 miles. If you add this up for each and every body cremated, you can see the toil it is taking on the environment. On top of the massive fossil fuel use, the process also releases mercury into our air and water. Cremation also creates nasty byproducts such as nitrogen oxide, dioxins, and particulates that can be found in acid rain.
The National Funeral Directors Association reported that 53.8% of consumers are interested in green funerals in order to help save the environment and to cut the cost of their funeral. This is more than half of their clientele looking to do something unique to help save the planet. In the coming years, this percentage is only expected to increase. And, as long as more and more people are looking into new ways to lower their carbon footprint through having greener funerals, you can only expect to see a rise in the popularity of green funeral products, such as the Infinity Suit.