For years I’ve been telling my wife (aka our Arts Editor) to just toss me in a ditch when I die. (She doesn’t like that.) The options traditional to our society, being burial and cremation, seem to me to be a rejection of our earthly origins, and, on a more tangible level, an insult, however tiny, to our environment – we remove our bodies as food for the worms, after all our years of consuming, consuming, consuming: we either immolate, denying the scavengers a last chance at us, or we bury ourselves, usually full of noxious chemicals and hidden away in a box of varying materials.
But now a new alternative is being put forward (discovered by my wife, of course). Fiona McDonald of Science Alert reports:
… a team of designers has come up with a more eco-friendly option – a jumpsuit woven from mushroom-spore-infused thread called the Infinity Burial Suit.Also known as the ‘mushroom death suit‘, the idea is that the mushrooms will begin to grow from your body once you’ve been buried, slowly digesting you, while neutralising any environmental contaminants you harbour – such as pesticides, heavy metals, or preservatives – in the process. First announced to a whole lot of controversy five years ago, the suit will now officially go on sale as early as April this year, with the first test subject already locked in.
Given my positive reaction to mycoremediation, this may be just the thing. Estimated retail: $999 – why can’t they just be honest and call it $1000? Marketing pursues us unto the grave?
Fiona also provides this rather shocking tidbit:
Cremation may sound more natural, but it isn’t much better, with our bodies needing to be burnt at temperatures between 760 and 1,150 degrees Celsius for 75 minutes – that’s an incredibly energy-intensive process, and it also releases a significant amount of greenhouse gases and toxins into the environment. In the UK, for example, cremation is responsible for 16 percent of the country’s mercury pollution thanks to all our old dental fillings.
I’ll just repeat that – 16% of UK mercury pollution comes from the cremation of corpses with mercury dental fillings. And mercury is a well-known environmental contaminant, usually associated with coal-burning power plants. I would never have guessed that dental fillings would have that sort of backlash.
