Green burials are gaining traction in the Washington area

Environmental concerns about traditional burials include the use of water, pesticides and pollution-producing lawn mowers at cemeteries. Also, extended exposure to the formaldehyde in embalming fluids raises a mortician’s risk for dying of myeloid leukemia, according to a 2009 study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Plus, there’s the idea of taking up a plot of land for eternity, land that the deceased aren’t exactly enriching. Sehee has calculated that Americans bury about 1 million tons of steel in caskets every year — enough to build another Golden Gate Bridge. And the amount of concrete used to make the vaults commonly built to house the caskets could build a two-lane highway from New York to Detroit, he says. Caskets are sometimes manufactured abroad and need to be shipped here, increasing a person’s posthumous carbon footprint.

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(Katherine Frey/THE WASHINGTON POST) - Carol Fox holds a duplicate of the plaque that adorns her son's Eternal Reef off the coast of Ocean City.

(Carol Fox/CAROL FOX) - Jamie Fox was studying environmental/marine science and philosophy at Salisbury University when he drowned while boogie boarding.

The average American burial cost $6,560 in 2009, according to the National Funeral Directors Association; burials are a rare product where consumers may save some money by opting for a green option. A green burial can cost about half what a traditional one does because families don’t have to pay for embalming and body preparation, a headstone or an expensive casket.

The mid-Atlantic has been slow to catch on to the idea of green burials, which has been a hot topic in the funeral industry for almost a decade.

“You’re not sitting in one of the hot spots for green burials,” Sehee says about Washington. It is most popular on the West Coast and least popular in the South, he says.

Some think green burials are mostly hype.

“There’s an industry joke that more people attend green burial seminars than get buried green,” says Mark Matthews, president of the Cremation Association of North America.

‘A part of nature’

Congressional Cemetery in Southeast Washington has been offering green burials for a year. Manager Alan Davis says it has been “a slow-going process,” but he hasn’t advertised the new practice anywhere other than on his institution’s Web site.

Walk to the southern tip of Congressional’s 33¹ / ₂ acres — past the graves of longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, more than 90 members of Congress and a vice president — to reach the designated green burial area. According to Davis, the cemetery has pre-sold two plots in this area. Congressional did three green burials in the cemetery last year, before Davis decided to designate the special section. Green plots and standard plots at Congressional cost roughly the same amount.

The area will accommodate about 75 graves, which will be gridded out in the Washington-standard 8-by-3-foot plots. Only one person will be buried in each space, as opposed to the five interments per grave that are allowed in the rest of the cemetery (two burials, one on top of the other, plus three urns, one at the head, middle and foot). Green graves are “designed to collapse,” Davis says, and need to be continually filled in with extra dirt; the ground is too unstable for multiple interments.

(Animals — especially the dogs that are allowed in Congressional for off-leash walks — are not able to dig down to the bodies because they would have to get through “several tons of dirt,” Davis says.)

Because there aren’t any headstones in the green burial area, a map of where people are interred is kept in the office. Davis is still deciding how he wants to commemorate the folks buried there: Ideas include engraving the names into a large boulder or a plaque.

“This cemetery is a pre-Civil War cemetery, started in 1807, so we practiced what has now come to be known as ‘green burials’ years and years and years ago,” Davis says.

Modern embalming hadn’t even been invented in 1807; it became common during the Civil War when soldiers died far from home and their families wanted their loved ones brought back. To keep the soil free of any leached chemicals, Davis says, bodies in the green burial area cannot be embalmed.

The concrete vaults that Davis requires in the traditional part of the cemetery to prevent the ground from caving in were not common until the middle of the 20th century. Vaults are not allowed in the green burial area, but caskets are required — no shroud-only burials. The biodegradable caskets must be free of chemical resins that can leach into the ground.

“A lot of traditional funeral practices provide a way for the body to be protected from the elements rather than become a part of nature,” Sehee says. “Green burials flip that around.”