Imagine your final act, helping a forest grow. Hi, I’m Andrew, Funeral Director, and I want to talk to you today about terramation.
Terramation is natural organic reduction, or also known as human composting.
Sounds a bit odd, but it’s a new idea that is, I think, going to be something in the future, particularly for people like New Zealanders who love that idea of returning to nature, a very natural way. It saves, obviously, a lot on carbon credits. You’re actually not using fuel, basically, you’re just using that natural organic process and speeding it up.
So how does it work? It’s a little bit like a burial where you put someone in the ground, but you do it in reverse. You get a receptacle, a casket, and you place the deceased in, having been washed and prepared, and then you fill that casket with organic matter. Some very specific organic traits that are in the nutrients that we put in there, so it speeds that normal process up.
A wonderful idea for returning someone to nature, but in New Zealand law, how is that going to work? It doesn’t exist in New Zealand, it does exist in some places in America, and they are trying to get around the laws to make it more common worldwide. One of the things I think we can do in New Zealand is actually have a receptacle in an above-ground vault. Now, in old cemeteries, they do still have these above-ground vaults, and you can build them again new.
And the idea would be to put the receptacle in a vault, the deceased, as I say, is prepared in a natural state. I’ve developed a thing called EcoPrep for natural burials, which flushes the toxins out of the body, mostly are found in the blood, particularly when you’ve had a lot of pharmaceuticals. And when you flush those toxins out, then the body can break down naturally.
This is particularly good with terramation. So we place the deceased in the casket with that organic matter around them. Obviously, they have to be dressed in natural fibres, and then that casket is interred officially under New Zealand law, and you can’t disinter once they’re in there until after 12 months.
So you can then re-disinter them and re-inter them back in the cemetery somewhere. And there’s lots of great ideas like putting a postal gown, making a big hole and putting that lovely organic matter, and then planting a tree, maybe making a forest glade, maybe making a bushwalk, a Kiwi bushwalk, lots of ways that, particularly in New Zealand, and I think Australia as well, we could make terramation a wonderful natural part of life. So terramation, a beautiful way to let life grow on.
If you want to know more about terramation or any of the other topics we’ve covered, go to our website kapitifunerals.co.nz/blogs.
