Eco-Cardboard coffins and Natural burial sites

Eco coffins are made from environmentally sound plain cardboard (they can be customised too) to cater for a  non wasteful funeral and your last dying wish.

Reflecting a worldwide trend towards environmentally friendly burials, eco burial sites are popping up all over Australia. Relatives and friends will require a satellite navigation device to find graves of loved ones in New South Wales’s first eco-burial site. The deceased will be buried in biodegradable coffins between gum trees in a protected koala sanctuary on bushland attached to Lismore Memorial Park Cemetery in the Northern Rivers region. The company LifeArt provide a range of cardboard coffins that can be ordered via participating funeral parlours in Australia.

The London based “Natural Death Centre” recently hosted the green funeral exhibition at the Conway Hall where exhibitors from all over the UK displayed diverse examples of biodegradable coffins, shrouds and jewellery as well as offering funeral specific green advice and services.

Ghost Bikes

Just 5 minutes from where I live is a ghost bike: a painted white bicycle that has been locked to a fence to act as a memorial to a recent bike fatality in the area. I ride past it every day and every time I see it I am extremely aware of how easy it is to be destroyed by an oncoming vehicle. It is disturbing but a moving gesture of remembrance and warning to all those on the road and not just to cyclists. The idea of the ghost bike memorial has its roots in St. Louis, Missouri since 2003. The ghostbike.org site it is intended to act as a meeting point for discussion and locates incidents in various cities around the world and was set up by the NYC Street Memorial Project. It is a space where those lost on dangerous streets can be remembered by their loved ones, members of their local communities, and others from around the world. They hope to inspire more people to start installing ghost bikes in their communities and to initiate changes that will make it safer to travel on the streets.