Bury Me Green: Eco-Friendly Funeral Options

Boomers just like to change things. It is a fact that they started the first Earth Day and have lifted the sales of organic foods into the stratosphere. Now, though, boomer want to go home green. Not to their earthly homes -no! Home - that place after life. Wherever we might believe it will be. Green funerals, and burial products have just begun to find themselves on the national radar. Five states, Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska and New York all require that funeral directors are involved to some degree over that last rite of passage. But, the other 45 states are fine with green goodbye's on private property and privileged handling of the deceased body. Here are seven ways to be eco-savvy after saying goodbye to this good earth.

1) Request to be wrapped in a natural-fiber shroud. The greatest value concerning a natural fiber shroud is that pollution is eradicated. And you can choose what type of shroud to wear before your demise. No blue suit or silly pink dress for you. Unless of course it is made of natural fiber. And is biodegradable.

2) Forget the embalming fluid. I have always felt that being embalmed was pretty gruesome. Although, it is true that the dearly departed would not know that horrible chemicals have been shot through their veins, it is still awful to think that those chemicals are being left behind to seep into future generations. Believe it or not, a projected 827,000 gallons of embalming fluid, which contains cool stuff like methanol, formaldehyde and phenol are buried in America each year.

3) Go home in a pine box. What was good enough for your ancestors before the Civil War can be good enough for you. And from what is being learned, assembling a regular pine casket doesn't take much more than a screwdriver. Many are discussing decorating their pine boxes with symbols of events taken from their lifetime. If they were a mechanic, they could use an impression of a screwdriver to place on the box. Nifty, huh?

4) Save the high cost of the traditional funeral. Funerals now cost upwards from 6,000 dollars and that is very cheap. Get a pine box, slip on a shroud and find a nice woodland cemetery and you might depart for as little as one thousand green ones.

5) If you don't like the idea of a pine box, or even a compost able urn, try the Ecopad. This is a wood coffin shaped in the form of a kayak. Happy sailing!

6) Call for your final resting place to be in a very eco-friendly setting. Since more and more green burial grounds are beginning to take shape, the boomer generation should have no problem with this. Some families have already begun this journey with parents, and other kin. One man stated that he received a kind of healing effect when burying his mother in a woodland area. Using a tree or another type of natural symbol to commemorate the sacredness of the area is also an alternative.

7) Search the Net for green burial grounds. Place the term 'green burials' in a Google search engine and you will receive 1,020,000 hits.

As is apparent, living green has been proven to be a cleaner and more economic feasible way to spend our time here on earth. Why not leave it the same way?