You've heard about eco-friendly vacations and reusable shopping bags.... how about green funerals?

Growing in popularity across the U.S. are funeral services that don't include cremation (which is cheap but produces lots of greenhouse gases), embalming fluids (toxic pollutants) or metal coffins (which don't biodegrade), according to this report.

The green way to go, according to this new industry, is to quickly put the deceased, without any embalming fluids or makeup, into a cardboard box or wooden coffin.  Then bury him or her in a wildlife area, with only a natural rock as a marker.  The key: use the thousands of dollars that would have been spent on a conventional funeral on instead buying conservation easements to help permanantly protect a piece of land.  That way, a person returns naturally into the Earth -- and prevents blacktop or stripmalls from blighting the landscape in the future.

Sounds like a peaceful departure.  But there are downsides, according to the Chicago Tribune: "Green burials also have downsides, mainstream funeral directors contend. They say that makeup application, often used to make the deceased look better after long illnesses, is difficult without embalming. They worry that doing viewings quickly -- usually within 24 to 48 hours to beat any decomposition -- is sometimes too fast for grieving families. They say that digging graves in some parts of the country can be next to impossible for weeks on end in winter, but that unembalmed bodies should not be kept unburied for that long. And they assert that embalming cuts down on the risk, however small, of disease transmission....."

Is this the next frontier of green living?  

A discussion of this subject has been continuing on Treehugger,
with one writer suggesting that coffins made of recycled newspaper are the most eco-elegant way to go.  (Perhaps for someone in the newspaper biz.  But wait....isn't that how dead fish make their exit?)  Or how about a coffin woven from wicker? (See above photo from the British company Greenendings, which advertises "individualised, eco-friendly funerals" with "a range of papier mache, wicker and bamboo caskets....)"

Correspondent Kpod asks if an ethically superior goodbye is to simply donate one's body to medical research.   "So which is greener: a green/woodland burial, or recycling your body by donating it to science?"

I wonder how many people would even care that much about what happens to them after they're gone?