My sexagenerian friend Bill sent me this story about banana coffins. I have never liked the idea of western burial coffins. Both my mother and father (dressed only from the waist up I learned) were bedded in iron and steel in the ground. I have requested cremation, but this is not bad. Anything that disintegrates and returns my molecules to the Great Beyond.
By CATHERINE TSAI – 1 day ago
DENVER (AP) — Casket makers catering to natural burials have offered biodegradable coffins made of such materials as recycled newspapers or cardboard. Ecoffins USA, based in Montrose, Colo., is selling caskets made of banana sheaves.
They take six months to two years to biodegrade.
Marketing director Joanna Passarelli says the company sold $40,000 worth of banana-sheaf or bamboo coffins to funeral homes last year.
At least 14 funeral homes around the country offer them.
“We either get an, ‘Oh, my,’ or, ‘That’s very interesting,’” Passarelli said. “Some people think it’s a great idea. We’ve had funeral directors look at them and say, ‘I guess you can go to hell in a handbasket now.’”
In natural burials, bodies aren’t embalmed and eventually decompose into the earth.
Ecoffins USA is the sister company of The SAWD Partnership, which has helped fuel the “green” funeral movement in the United Kingdom.
Sax-Tiedemann Funeral Home and Crematorium in Franklin, Ill., has sold one banana Ecoffin since it started offering Ecoffins in the last several months.
Stephen Dawson, owner and president of Sax-Tiedemann, said it’s not that far removed from the woven baskets funeral homes used in the 1950s and ’60s to pick up bodies from hospitals and nursing homes.
Passarelli contends the bamboo and banana coffins, made in Asia, are better for the environment than the cremation process.
Her interest in ecofriendly coffins grew after her son’s school showed the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” in which Al Gore warns of climate change. Her son came home wondering why he should bother with homework if the world would be destroyed.
“I said if everybody did one little thing it would have a snowball effect,” she said.
Tags: Environment | Recycling | banana coffins
At right is a piece of litter I love to find when I am walking, running or hiking. This is the first time that I found a snake shed in the wild. This one was coiled tightly almost in a ball and abandoned on the Riverwalk Greenway this morning. It is from a very large snake. I assume that it is probably from a Northern water snake, as the Harpeth River runs along the greenway. Northern water snakes are plentiful in the area and can grow to be quite large.
During one of my evening walks, I was dismayed to find the nice sign at the Riverwalk subdivision vandalized. I have also seen obscene graffiti on the bridge in the Riverwalk neighborhood.
Sometimes I am shocked by the trash I find in the street. What litterer thought that dumping an unused (thanks!) sanitary napkin in the street would be amusing?
Tonight on my walk, this small blue ball rolled past me in the gutter. Luckily I was able to pick it up before it fell into the storm drain.
I’ve been waging a war on empty plastic water bottles tossed onto the streets for a few years now. Earlier this week, I noticed a full unopened plastic water bottle on my street. I did not pick it up as I thought a walker or runner might have placed it there intentionally. Since it was still there today, I picked it up, emptied the contents on a young tulip poplar in my yard and recycled the bottle.
