In most of the world today, the choice of what happens to our remains after we die is a binary one – cremation or burial. But the funeral industry has a dirty secret: it’s terrible for the environment.
A single cremation uses the same amount of energy as an 800km (500-mile) car journey. In the US, where nearly two-thirds of people are cremated when they die, crematoria pump 360,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) into the atmosphere every year.
Incinerated dental fillings release an estimated 1.2g of vaporised mercury per body. And at popular scattering spots, the mineral content and pH of human ashes can alter the composition of the soil and harm delicate plants.
The number of people choosing cremation in the UK has grown year on year since the early 1900s, escalating rapidly in the 50s and 60s as religious and cultural attitudes shifted. In 2024, more than 80 per cent picked cremation over burial.
“The combined result of all that corporeal carbon, plus coffin carbon, plus fossil fuel carbon [to power the furnace] means that we’re dumping thousands of tonnes straight into the atmosphere every year in the UK alone,” says Rosie Inman-Cook, manager of the Natural Death Centre, a UK charity that gives free, impartial advice on all aspects of dying, bereavement and consumer rights.
Traditional burial is hardly better. “I know because I was there; I did the thing,” says John Christian Phifer, who worked as an embalmer and funeral director in his native Tennessee for 15 years. “I’ve seen how much waste goes into the ground. We’re essentially creating landfills.”
The materials buried along with our dead include nearly 3,000 tonnes of copper and bronze, 100,000 tonnes of steel, 1.5 million tonnes of reinforced concrete and 30 million board feet (one board foot is 1ft x 1ft x 1in) of hardwood each year in the US. Manufacturing and transporting coffins and headstones, plus graveyard upkeep, are all resource-intensive, polluting and destructive to the climate.
Around half of all dead bodies are embalmed in the UK – a process that involves draining the corpse of blood and replacing it with a toxic formaldehyde fluid to preserve the appearance of the body for viewing. In the US, the practice is ubiquitous, unless a person or their family explicitly opts out. These chemicals are known carcinogens, and over time they can leach into the soil in graveyards.
The bleak reality is that for most of us, irrespective of how we choose to live our lives, our last gesture on this planet will be a toxic one.
Return to nature
By 2012, Phifer found himself so disillusioned by this prospect that he quit his job and spent a month travelling the country by train, talking to strangers about their values and what better death care would look like.
Today, he’s the founder and executive director of Larkspur Conservation, a non-profit that stewards a protected woodland near Nashville, Tennessee, where families can bury their dead directly into the ground.
In a ‘natural burial’, the body is wrapped in a cotton shroud or placed into a coffin made from biodegradable materials such as willow or wicker. No embalming chemicals are used and no makeup or synthetic products are applied to the skin. It’s basically what burial looked like for most of human history.
We’re used to the notion of bodies being buried “six feet under” – a practice that dates back to the time of the bubonic plague, when it was ordered to help curb the spread of the disease. In a natural burial, the body is laid in a shallower grave of around one metre (3-4ft), within the soil’s ‘living layer’.
Here, oxygen is plentiful and microbes and fungal networks gradually break down the body’s soft tissues and deliver its nutrients to the surrounding soil. At this depth, smells can’t reach the surface and the corpse isn’t at risk of being dug up by animals.
“If you want your Mom to be a tree, the best way to do it is to just allow your Mom’s body to be placed in the ground and feed the ecosystem, ride the mycelium network,” says Phifer, referring to the vast underground web of fungal threads that underpins the health of forests, and lets plants and trees share nutrients and send out signals about threats.
Besides transporting the body and mourners to the burial ground, the carbon cost of a natural burial is virtually zero. Conservation burial grounds such as Larkspur go one step further by protecting and rewilding land that was previously degraded by activities like agriculture, mining or timber harvesting.
“We use natural burial as a tool to reset that site, so our bodies get to become this gift back to the land,” says Phifer. “Every grave becomes an opportunity for restoration and reintroduction of native plant species.”
As well as sequestering the carbon contained in the deceased’s body, each conservation burial at Larkspur continues to sequester a further 10kg (22lbs) of CO2 each year, says Phifer, as nearby plants and trees flourish and grow.
Only people who die from Ebola are ineligible for a natural burial.
Chemotherapy drugs are not prohibitive, because they’re usually stopped before a person dies, and tend to be processed and excreted within 72 hours. The half-lives of most other medications are short in the body, and by the time of death any residual traces pose no environmental risk.
In the UK today, there are more than 300 natural burial grounds, according to Inman-Cook, including many ‘hybrid’ sites that are managed by local authorities within existing municipal cemeteries. Between 2015 and 2025, the number of natural burial grounds in the US and Canada grew from around 100 to nearly 500. It’s a growing movement, but natural burial isn’t suitable in all locations.
“If you live in a climate that’s under snow for the majority of the year, it’s going to be much more difficult,” says Phifer. “And there are some areas, like deserts, where the land is so dry that decomposition and return of the body’s resources to the ecosystem… is just not going to occur.”
It’s also a non-starter in locations such as Manhattan, New York, where wide-open space is in short supply.
Mulch me when I’m gone
“Natural burial is pretty much a perfect process,” says Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Seattle-based company Recompose. But for city-dwellers like her, or those whose loved ones live a long drive from a natural burial ground, there’s another way to give your body back to nature.
Recompose opened the world’s first human composting facility in 2021 – taking dead bodies and transforming them into nutrient-rich soil.
Human composting takes the elements of forest-floor decomposition – in which microbes recycle organic matter – and adds technology to speed it up in above-ground “vessels”, housed in warehouse-like urban spaces. Spade began developing the idea in 2011 while studying for a PhD in architecture, adapting and extrapolating on a method already in widespread use in animal agriculture.
At Recompose, the process begins by laying the unembalmed body on a bed of alfalfa, straw and other plant materials, tailored to each body to give the optimal ratio of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and water to drive microbial action.
Next, the bed is sealed in a large, space-age-looking, cylindrical pod. From here, the temperature inside the vessel rises as microbes within the body begin breaking it down over a period of five to seven weeks. Staff at the facility monitor the temperature and airflow inside the vessel, and turn it periodically to reignite the process.
Once the microbes have broken down all of the soft tissues, staff recover any medical implants, then grind the bones to a powder (via the same process used at crematoria) and return this to the mix. Finally, the soil is cured for a further three to five weeks, at which point it’s ready to nurture new life.
The entire process takes 8-12 weeks, depending on the size of the person, and results in just under 1m3 (around one cubic yard) of compost. Loved ones can choose to take a portion home or donate it to non-profit conservation organisations.
One of Spade’s favourite stories involves a man named Wayne, who in life was a dedicated gardener with a passion for Japanese maples. Wayne’s family took all of his compost home, where 40 of his friends and neighbours showed up with buckets to collect a little bit of him. Today, Wayne’s remains are nurturing Japanese maples around his hometown and beyond.
A model developed by environmental engineer Dr Troy Hottle found that human composting uses 87 per cent less energy than cremation and saves one metric tonne of carbon pollution per person – equivalent to driving around 4,000km (2,500 miles).
It doesn’t use or produce any toxic chemicals and because the vessel maintains a temperature of 55°C (131°F) for a minimum of three consecutive days, pathogens and pharmaceuticals are eliminated or inactivated. Only people who die from Ebola, tuberculosis or prion diseases such as CJD are ineligible for composting.
Spade designed the vessel system to stack vertically, giving it a small footprint that makes it ideal for use in densely built places such as Tokyo. “People reach out from all over the world,” she says. “If I had to guess, I think we’ll see widespread adoption and a mainstreaming of this idea in the next 10 years, for sure.”
Human composting is not yet legal in the UK, but acceptance has been rapid in the US since Recompose opened in 2021. It’s now legal in 14 US states and on the docket in at least 14 more. It’s also legal in Sweden, and talks are underway in several other European countries.
To date, more than 600 bodies have been transformed at the Seattle facility and a few thousand people have prepaid to use the service after they die. Several copycat facilities have sprung up since Recompose opened four years ago.
“The constraint is always going to be that it takes a month and change to compost a body, and it only takes a few hours to cremate one,” says Spade. “That said, when we get up to scale, we’ll be able to care for close to 1,000 clients per year, which is a pretty decent size for one facility.”
Dissolving the dead
For some people, though, the efficiency of cremation is its chief appeal. For people in that camp looking to make an equally fuss-free, but more climate-friendly exit, water cremation – or alkaline hydrolysis – could fit the bill.
In a water cremation, the body is placed in a biodegradable shroud and immersed in a mixture that’s 95 per cent water and five per cent alkaline solution, inside a steel chamber. The liquid is heated to 160°C (320°F) under high pressure, causing the body’s molecular bonds to disintegrate and the tissues to dissolve.
After around four hours, what remains is a sterile, coffee-coloured solution of amino acids, sugars, peptides and salts, along with softened skeletal bones and teeth – which are ground into a fine powder and returned to loved ones like ash from a conventional flame cremation.
The process breaks down all pathogens and pharmaceuticals, meaning that the liquid remains are safe to send into the municipal wastewater system.
In some locations, the nitrogen-rich solution can also be sent to tree farms to fertilise the crop. Water cremation uses 90 per cent less energy than flame cremation and releases no toxic gases or CO2 .
Alkaline hydrolysis has been used at some US hospitals since the mid-90s to dispose of cadavers used in medical research – and for at least 100 years prior to that to process animal carcasses for use in fertiliser. A funeral home in Ohio was the first to offer water cremation in 2011.
Today it’s legal in 28 US states, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and several provinces in Canada. In 2023, Ireland became the first country in Europe to legalise it.
In the UK, Co-op Funeralcare announced plans to begin offering it in 2023, but the launch was stalled by the lack of a regulatory framework. Scottish lawmakers are due to debate its introduction later this year, and in England and Wales, the Law Commission is drafting recommendations and a Bill to send to Parliament in spring 2026.
It ran a public consultation this summer to gather people’s views on both alkaline hydrolysis and human composting. If lawmakers give these processes the green light, they will be the first alternative ways to dispose of a body in the UK since the introduction of the Cremation Act in 1902.
Industry habits die hard
Among consumers, there’s an appetite for change. Research commissioned by Co-op Funeralcare found that 29 per cent of UK residents would choose a water cremation if it were available today.
Meanwhile, a 2025 report by the US National Funeral Directors Association found that 60.5 per cent of Americans are interested in green funeral alternatives, up five per cent from 2021.
But not everyone is on board. Detractors argue that alkaline hydrolysis is undignified; akin to “flushing Grandma down the drain”. When one crematorium in the Midlands attempted to introduce the process in 2017, Severn Trent Water refused them a permit to send the liquid remains into the sewer, citing safety concerns – despite hospitals and mortuaries routinely discharging large quantities of blood and chemicals into the exact same system.
In several US states, the Catholic Church has objected to human composting, declaring that it reduces the human body to a “disposable commodity”.
And while Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu had a water cremation, per his wishes, when he died in 2022, the Catholic Church has lobbied US lawmakers over its introduction, saying that pouring liquid remains into the sewer is “unnecessarily disrespectful of the human body”.
Of course, the Catholic Church didn’t endorse flame cremations until 1963, during the papacy of Pope Paul VI; by which point, they already accounted for 41 per cent of UK funerals.
The biggest resistance of all, though, is from the funeral industry itself, says Phifer: “[They’ve] created rules and regulations and Boards that oversee how everything’s done in a community, and they’ve made it very restrictive for any new options to come in.”
This is especially true for natural burial, which, as well as removing opportunities to upsell products to grieving families – embalming, elaborate coffins, headstones, decorative urns and so on – doesn’t even include a process, like cremation, that can be billed.
Inman-Cook agrees: “They like a nice, quick, timed turnaround at the crematorium. More funerals in the day with the same team and fleet – and they keep their shoes clean.”
Read more:
