Now you can be buried in a coffin made of fungi

Welcome to our weekly newsletter where we highlight environmental trends and solutions that are moving us to a more sustainable world. 

Hi, it’s Anand. Our science and climate team comes alive while talking about death, and I loved the chance to explore a newish, greenish death practice — and what we leave behind on Earth.

This week:

• Now you can be buried in a coffin made of fungi
• The Big Picture: Corporate climate targets are stalling
• Here’s what happens when compostable products become litter

Now you can be buried in a coffin made of fungi

James Earl Jones, playing Mufasa in The Lion King, told me (and I reckon a few of us) that our bodies become the grass. 

That’s the voice I heard standing in front of the natural burial area of Meadowvale Cemetery in Brampton, Ont. — surrounded by the towering teasels and goldenrods, hearing the buzzing of bees and flies.

Because under all this wild growth, there are bodies.  People whose burial here sends a message about how death can give life back to nature. People who either chose, or had the choice made for them by loved ones, to be buried here. 

A short drive away, on display at the cemetery’s main funeral centre, was a new offering for people who might consider that natural burial area.

“It’s quite soft, it’s almost like a blend of Styrofoam and cotton,” described Angie Aquino, president of Canadian Memorial Services, as she showed me the Loop Living Cocoon. 

It’s a coffin, priced at $3,750, made of upcycled hemp fibres and mycelium, the root structure that fungi use and a material used in other sustainable-focused products. Why? Because in the soil, this coffin eventually biodegrades. 

The appeal, says Aquino, is for a customer whose “value system in life is something that they want to maintain in death as well.” For some, that might be about giving back to the earth and nourishing the soil. 

Which is why clothing must be of natural fibres and there’s no embalming, no jewelry, and no tokens of remembrance placed in the coffin allowed; people are given the option of the natural burial area to let their bodies decompose.

For its inventor, Loop Biotech’s Bob Hendrikx, natural burial is a complement to his mission of enriching nature.  

“They’re nature’s biggest recycler,” Hendrikx said of mushrooms. Fast-growing, a full coffin is grown in seven days and dried out to hold shape. In ideal soil conditions, it takes around 45 days to biodegrade (the whole body can still take years to fully decompose). 

“If you compare it to wood [coffins] or even metal, those things take decades. And here, we’re talking about days or months,” he explained to me from Delft, in the Netherlands. On its website, Loop Biotech claims the coffin adds to the “biodiversity of the soil” around it as it degrades, and Hendrikx says other coffins may also contain chemical additives that could leach into the soil. Hendrikx estimates Loop Biotech has sold more than 2,000 cocoons in Europe, and has just started in North America. 

There’s a mixed bag of research to quantify conventional death practices and their environmental impact. Dutch research on cremation puts it at around 200 kilograms CO2-equivalent per person. But a 2017 City of Paris study put the carbon cost of burial at more than 800 kilograms of CO2, partly because it involves the impact of land use, concrete or metal if a burial vault is used, and the wood for the coffin itself — with some estimates suggesting millions of wooden boards used for coffins annually (not to mention millions of litres of formaldehyde-containing embalming fluid, too). 

At the same time, recent Dutch research suggests natural burials and pre-purchases of them have taken off in the last few years. 

It’s early days for the “mushroom coffin” at Meadowvale. Its price, for comparison, is in the middle of the range — with the most basic particle-board coffin offered at $450 and some higher-end options ranging from $6,000 to $13,000. Some do see this consumerist approach to being environmentally-conscious in death as unnecessary. 

“We do need some of those products. We do need some simple caskets.… We do need the shrouds made a certain way,” said Cathy Valentine, cemetery manager of the Salt Spring Island Natural Cemetery in British Columbia. 

“What we don’t need is a whole lot of that.” 

Valentine, also on the board of the Green Burial Society of Canada, sees natural burials as inclusive of different family rituals and desires, but can be as simple as burying a body in a shroud and ensuring native grasses and plants grow above. What’s more, an environmentally conscious death doesn’t need to be about measuring emissions.

“It isn’t just presenting the carbon ratios of doing this burial versus this cremation. It’s really about the values,” Valentine said, calling it the “soft stuff” that matters. 

And it’s telling that everyone I spoke to used the word “values” to describe why a person would want this kind of natural return to the earth: Aside from its potential regenerative capacity to the planet, it tells a story that they cared about it. 

— Anand Ram

Old issues of What on Earth? are here. The CBC News climate page is here. 

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Reader feedback

Last week, we looked at how a Burnaby, B.C., condo resident has been trying to solve a shortage of (Level 2) EV charging stations at his building. Several readers suggested a solution for some buildings with similar issues could be slow (Level 1) charging with standard 110 V outlets, which may already be available in individual apartment or condo parking spots in many parts of Canada. Mark Sibley wrote: “In some Canadian cities (but likely not in lower B.C.), it was common for parking lots to have block heater outlets. The same approach could be used for EVs.”

Here’s more about how Level 1 charging can be a solution for some EV drivers, and when it might not work.

In our last issue, we also mentioned that the passive heating, cooling and ventilation provided by solar chimneys at Limberlost Place at Toronto’s George Brown college is supplemented by a district heating and cooling system operated by Enwave Energy Corp.

Bailey Martel shared his experiences working in another Toronto building on this network. “While I think the technology is incredible, it is not without its faults. It occasionally stops working, leaving the buildings that rely on it either muggy or freezing, depending on the season.… With all of that said, it is certainly better than the usual HVAC solutions.… Nothing is perfect, and it will take a lot of trial and error to figure out how to sustainably heat and cool the world.”

Share your story: Do you live in a household that doesn’t own a car or truck? We’re interested to hear about your experiences. (Thank you to those who have already reached out.) What community do you live in? Why don’t you own a vehicle? What options do you use to get around? We’re interested in doing a future article about this.

Write us at whatonearth@cbc.ca (and send photos there too!)

The Big Picture: Corporate climate targets are stalling

Canadian companies are moving slower on decarbonization target-setting, according to a new report from the Institute for Sustainable Finance. The Queen’s University think-tank says about half of the firms listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange that report their carbon emissions have some kind of emissions target, but with wide variations between industries. Telecommunication and utility companies are leading the way in setting targets, while the energy sector is lagging behind. The report also said that the number of companies putting out net-zero targets has stalled — because of recent controversy over the term ‘carbon neutral’ and the exit of financial firms from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance.

— Inayat Singh

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

Here’s what happens when ‘compostable’ products become litter

Single-use plastic items are a substantial contributor to litter across Canada, but compostable alternatives can follow a similar path, Marketplace has found.

As various levels of government ban many single-use plastic items, compostable products are rising in popularity. But Marketplace found these alternatives are not as great for the planet as their green packaging seems to suggest.

To simulate what would happen to compostable items if they ended up in our environment, Marketplace buried items in the ground, in a backyard composter and submerged them in a lake.

After 14 weeks, only three out of 30 products completely broke down.

“It’s single-use garbage,” said Karen Wirsig, from the advocacy group Environmental Defence. “What companies are trying to do is continue to use the same convenient-for-them, single-use packaging, and just try to get rid of it in a different way.”

Just a few items fully broke down

By the end of Marketplace’s experiment, compostable coffee lids, wheat straws, compostable plastic bags, compostable plastic spoons, birch forks and bamboo plates were all easily identifiable, and most looked nearly brand new.

One compostable coffee cup and lid broke into fragments, which Wirsig from Environmental Defence says is bad news for animals.

“It becomes food for all kinds of unsuspecting organisms and then all the additives in there. What’s happening with them? Where are they going? Are they moving up our food web into animals that we end up eating?”

The only items to fully disappear were the paper plate in the lake, and the paper straw and paper plate buried in the ground.

Meanwhile, for millions of Canadians, composting isn’t as straightforward as it seems.

The fine print

Easy to see on compostable products are green claims like “soon becomes soil” and “let’s save the world together.” Less easy to see is the fine print: “Compostable in commercial facilities where available,” which often means a specific set of circumstances is required for the product to decompose — particular heat levels, microbes and aeration.

Some cities accept compostable items with caveats, like certification or material requirements. Often, it’s too difficult for municipal systems to tell the difference between compostable plastic and single-use plastic.

And if you’re one of the millions of Canadians whose municipalities do not accept compostable items, it’s nearly impossible to access a commercial composter.

Marketplace reached out to 30 major cities across Canada. Many cities, even if they had an organics processing system, do not accept non-organic items labelled compostable. 

In Canada’s three largest cities — Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver — that means compostable plastic all gets diverted to the landfill.

“For the consumer, they’re paying extra because they think they’re doing something better for the environment,” said Matt Keliher, general manager of Toronto’s solid waste, but really taxpayers are paying more for the system to process out and transport the compostable plastic contaminants, instead of a straight trip to the landfill.

‘Very challenging for … the general consumer’

Keliher says Toronto’s system is designed to filter out any plastic material, compostable or otherwise. All waste gets added to a tank and blended, which lets plastics and non-organic contaminants float, get skimmed off and diverted to landfill. 

The system allows the public to store their waste in plastic bags, making it more accessible, with the benefit of not needing to spend extra money on compostable bags, says Keliher.  

When compostable items end up in landfill, says Cal Lakhan, director of one of Canada’s largest waste research initiatives, materials that break down will release carbon and methane into the atmosphere, “so unless we have the ability to capture that carbon, it’s actually just extra emissions.”

This patchwork of rules between municipalities makes it difficult for both manufacturers to label their products consistently and for consumers to determine what can be composted where. Experts like Lakhan and Keliher are calling for more standardization.

“[It’s] very challenging for just the general consumer who wants to buy something compostable to do something better for the environment,” said Keliher.

Marketplace asked Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin for an on-camera interview about federal standardization around composting. Her office instead said in a statement its proposed rules around compostable product labelling are on hold while they’re being challenged in court.

Manufacturers respond

Marketplace reached out to manufacturers and sellers of products tested to ask why they continue to sell products with environmentally friendly imagery when millions of Canadians cannot compost these products under commercial conditions.

Walmart, Loblaw, Ziploc and Dollarama all said their products conform to independent composting standards, and are designed to break down in industrial compostable facilities, where they exist. They did not comment on Canadians who do not have access to these facilities. Sobeys did not respond.

Wirsig is calling on the industry to stop replacing single-use items with more single-use items. 

“Remember that the stuff that looks and feels and is marketed closer to plastic is effectively plastic, and it’s doing the same kind of damage in the environment,” she said. “Don’t go out of your way to spend more money on it, that’s for sure.”

Instead, focus on reusables, she says.

And if you forget them at home? Wirsig says companies should take the blame for that, too — and fix it.

“We’ve been trained by the industry that all this packaging is just a convenience item that causes no problem to anybody,” she said. “Reusable should be as convenient as garbage.”

— Jenny Cowley

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Editors: Emily Chung and Hannah Hoag | Logo design: Sködt McNalty