Providing funeral services puts your business in a valuable position in the community. When you offer an empathetic and relatively smooth experience, you’re giving locals the gift of being able to focus on navigating their grief and celebrating the memory of their loved ones.

Increasingly, one of the hallmarks of a positive funeral experience is sustainability. As consumers become more conscious of their environmental impact, they’re considering how the businesses they engage with help to minimize their footprint on the planet. There are business and ethical imperatives involved with being greener, so let’s take a closer look at why you should provide sustainable farewells and how you can approach doing so.

Understanding the Impact

As a provider of funeral services, you likely already know your business has a significant impact on customers. At what can be one of the most challenging times in life, you provide a peace of mind from knowing the remains of their loved one will be handled respectfully. At the same time, it’s vital to understand traditional funeral practices can harm the planet. You can make targeted improvements by getting to know the causes of this better.

Some of the issues to be aware of include the following:

Chemical use

Modern embalming methods utilize a lot of chemicals. In particular, there is increasing recognition of how toxic alcohols — ethanol, methanol, and isopropanol — present environmental and health hazards. Embalming fluids are still made with a proportion of methanol, while isopropanol is often used for cleaning and hand sanitization. Accidental ingestion is the chief concern health-wise. However, these and other chemicals used in embalming can lead to environmental issues when the body decays or is cremated. The chemicals may leach into the soil following burial, causing damage, or may release toxic fumes into the atmosphere during cremation.

Casket materials

Many people feel finding an ornate casket is a good reflection of how important their loved one was to them. Yet, these items can also use significant natural resources. Around 30 million board feet of wood is used for caskets in the US each year. Caskets with synthetic products may introduce non-biodegradable materials to the earth.

Eco-Friendly Alternatives to Consider

The environmental hazards of the funeral industry don’t mean it’s an irreversibly negative influence. There are many green alternatives to the traditional processes. Depending on your company’s focus, there are various elements you could consider investing in.

These include:

• Natural embalming fluids: If customers require their loved ones to be embalmed, there are natural alternatives to the toxic chemicals we discussed earlier. Essential oils with antimicrobial and preservative properties can be part of the solution here, Not only do these have a lower footprint, but also tend to smell more pleasant. Some funeral providers even go back to ancient Egyptian roots to use honey in preservative methods.
• Aquamation: If cremation is a part of your services, “aquamation” is a green funeral option that produces far fewer emissions. The process involves submerging the remains in heated alkaline fluid for several hours, accelerating natural composition.
• Biodegradable caskets: Rather than relying on resource-heavy caskets, you could offer a range of different low-impact and biodegradable alternatives. This might include those made from cardboard, wicker or bamboo. These types of caskets also tend to be more cost-effective for customers on a budget.

These are far from the only examples of green alternatives to traditional methods. There’s a great deal of focus on the actions of the death industry at the moment and many entrepreneurs and vendors are offering fresh solutions. For instance, mycelium burial shrouds that aid decomposition are getting a lot of buzz, as are tree pod burials. By keeping abreast of innovations and trends, you can find solutions ideal for your customers and the planet.

Going Green Practically

You know the risks and the potential alternatives. They don’t automatically equate to a more eco-friendly funeral business, though. Rather, you need to adopt practical methods to make sustainability part of your business model in a meaningful and holistically positive way.

This approach begins with educating your staff members. Especially if you’re introducing new funeral technology into your services, they must understand how to use it safely, effectively and with maximum energy efficiency. For instance, when adopting aquamation, teach staff how to recycle the alkaline fluid to ensure a greener process. 

Another point of practicality is letting customers know eco-friendly services are available. It’s also worth considering sustainability is increasingly important to consumers, with many making purchasing decisions based on a company’s green actions. Indeed, it can give your business a competitive advantage over funeral service providers who are still stuck on traditional and polluting methods. 

Therefore, you must strategize your marketing. Create online content designed to delve into eco-friendly practices. Behind-the-scenes videos showcasing the technology you’ve adopted can be an excellent way to explain why your methods are better. You could create blog posts detailing how your green measures help the planet without reducing the quality of services. The better you can educate consumers about what you’re doing, the greater trust they may have that you can act sustainably and offer a positive farewell.

Conclusion

Providing eco-friendly funeral services is great for the planet and the business, while reassuring the public their loved ones have had the most positive farewell. There are various ways to approach this and it’s important to review what measures fit in with your company’s ethos and clientele. The important thing is to start making changes, even small ones. Take action today and you can make a difference for everyone involved.