$76 Coffins & Stewpot Urns | 4M #168

Welcome to the hundred-and-sixty-eighth edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #168, where we’ll serve up bite-sized, easily-digestible nuggets of the deathcare news you need to crush conversations in the week ahead. Bon appetit!

That NY and its laws …

A New York state funeral home has lost its bid to retain its funeral home/crematory combo status after it relocates. Sadly, New York’s Anti-Combination Act of 1998 prohibits any entity other than cemeteries from owning crematories. The funeral home in question had been “grandfathered in,” but its planned relocation prompted a legal review of its status, which has now been formally revoked with the governor’s signing of a bill stating such last week. At least one government official argued that forcing the funeral home to shut down would create a crematory shortage in the area; in addition, officials said that law itself is unusual compared to those of neighboring states, which don’t tie crematories only to cemeteries.

“Coffin’ up” more money

With the consistent decades-long spotlight on funeral home pricing in the U.S., perhaps it may come as a welcome reprieve to learn that another country is facing criticism for its recent 74% increase (!) on casket prices over the last three (!) years. Except … that country is Russia, and the price jump was due to the Russia-Ukraine war, and a 74% price increase constitutes only another $32 (3274 rubles).  Yep. That brings the current price of a coffin in Russia to a whopping $76.

Kudos to these GA FHs

Shout out to the 10 funeral homes that have stepped up to offer free services to the 18 families who were victimized by the actions of Chris Johnson of Johnson Funeral Home in Douglas, Georgia. These great folks are showing these grieving families what real deathcare is supposed to be, and we appreciate them for this. Johnson remains in jail as authorities continue working to identify the remains found in his facility in late October. Now, in addition to the original 17 felony counts of abuse of a dead body, Johnson now faces four new charges: three counts of violation of vital records registration and one count of theft by taking.

A new kind of fridge art

Yes — you guessed it — behind each of the randomly-sized photos adorning this wall is a secret pet refrigerator. Cool, huh? (pun intended). However, this idea is eliciting “gasps of horror” from employees of the Japanese commercial food-and-drink refrigerator company that has decided to venture into the mortuary cooler space. “We’re making refrigerators to store food, and you’re putting dead bodies in them?” one employee asked Hiroyuki Iwane, president of Tatumi Industrial Co. The president explained that the pandemic inspired this shift, as the company received zero refrigerator orders, while at the same time, pet ownership was growing. 

Double-duty urns

Speaking of food-storage-related deathcare happenings in eastern Asia … A family in China is furious with a local funeral parlor after a loved one’s cremains were presented in a “stew pot.” According to this story, a man picked up the cremains in June, accepting the container provided by the funeral home as he never selected one himself. Weeks later, though, he “found a strong resemblance between the ‘urn’ in his home and the pots containing nutritious soup.” Now his complaint about the funeral home’s disrespect for placing the cremains in a “stew pot” “kitchen utensil” has gone viral on social media.

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Affordable Caskets and Urns for Sale We Finance Bad Credit No Credit OK
Spanish: Ataúdes y Urnas Económicos en Venta - Financiamos Aunque Tenga Mal Crédito o Sin Crédito
French: Cercueils et Urnes Abordables à Vendre - Nous Finançons, Mauvais Crédit ou Pas de Crédit Accepté
Japanese: 手頃な価格の棺および壺を販売 - 悪いクレジットやクレジットがなくてもファイナンス可能
Korean: 저렴한 관과 운구 판매 - 나쁜 신용 또는 신용 없음, 금융 지원 가능

“Mushroom suits” arrived first, around 2011; they were initially celebrated as eco- and cost-conscious alternatives to traditional burial, a green and environmentally beneficial method of disposition.

And they sound great, in theory – here was, supposedly, a way to accelerate decomp through the expert powers of organic disassembly possessed by fungi alone. The extreme efficiency of the mycelial network is, in nature, well-known to be second to none in the process of taking apart once living things, bit by bit. So a personal mycelial network that sprouts upon burial to surround a body, then binds with toxins and heavy metals as it returns the corpse to a nutrient-dense soil, enriching the environment, sounded ideal. No embalming, no heavy casket, none of the pollution of traditional cremation.

Except, as we wrote in a previous review, the mushroom suit didn’t appear to do that… or, really, much of anything: put to the test, one suit didn’t even sprout. You may recall the circumstances: a suit-clad body was observed over time via also-buried camera. But what this experiment revealed was pretty much the same old decomp process you’d expect if the body had been shrouded in a regular bedsheet. No elaborate personal interlacing mycelial network. No mushroom block party. No lightning-fast feats of decomp.

So what can we expect, ten years later, from mushroom coffins?

Biodegradable

Okay, that’s definitely a bonus, if not an altogether unique one; that regular bedsheet is, after all, biodegradable, and so’s your average (unmushroomed) burial shroud; so, for that matter, is a cardboard box, or even one made of plain pine.

But where the mushroom coffins come in, that’s one of the clarion calls, though there are a couple of different features in addition to an eco-friendly profile.

Loop Biotech, a company in the Netherlands, has engineered its mushroom coffin to break down and itself be gone in 45 days. Made from “upcycled” hemp and mycelium, heat treated and meant to be watered upon burial to activate the spores, which flourish further with more fluids from putrefaction. The benefits of a coffin which basically disappears itself are considerable, and self-evident: less waste, less carbon footprint, less impact on the environment overall, so the mission is an honorable one; there don’t appear to be claims for accelerated decomposition.

Closer to home, however, US company Setas Eternal Living states ambitions more in line with the original mushroom suit: the Setas Eternal Living Coffin begins with a Reishi fungus and hemp substrate along with mycelium, “designed to biodegrade the human body in under three years,” and offers a pet-size option that it says can do the job in under two. With ambitions to become entirely carbon-neutral by 2026, the company’s overarching vision and mission are rooted in sustainability.

All things improve with time

Perhaps the harshest criticism of the mushroom suit was that it did not do what it claimed to. That camera where no mushroom bonanza was captured seemed damning evidence indeed, but one single observed instance of failure does not a conclusive result make. Still others chimed in that the mushroom suit didn’t do much of anything, certainly not more than Mother Earth herself would, eventually, whether the suit itself were present or not, so it was altogether unnecessary, serving no real purpose.

But as death care continues its evolution and public awareness grows, so grows the demand for variety in green options; mushroom suits and coffins already add variety to the field of affordable eco-conscious choices. That, of itself, is a good thing already. And the concept is much refined, in any event, in the ways of all technology — solid foundations for future innovation.

The post Mushroom… Coffins? appeared first on Connecting Directors.

Click the APPLY NOW BUTTON below to find out more about financing a casket.

Affordable Caskets and Urns for Sale We Finance Bad Credit No Credit OK
Spanish: Ataúdes y Urnas Económicos en Venta - Financiamos Aunque Tenga Mal Crédito o Sin Crédito
French: Cercueils et Urnes Abordables à Vendre - Nous Finançons, Mauvais Crédit ou Pas de Crédit Accepté
Japanese: 手頃な価格の棺および壺を販売 - 悪いクレジットやクレジットがなくてもファイナンス可能
Korean: 저렴한 관과 운구 판매 - 나쁜 신용 또는 신용 없음, 금융 지원 가능