When Margaret Eriksson's family in Sweden faced a difficult question a decade ago, they chose to wait. For more than ten years, her body remained in cold storage while the country explored a new way to handle the dead — a process called cryomation, or freeze-drying. Though that particular method never became available, the story reflects a quiet revolution happening across Europe and beyond: people are rethinking what happens to our bodies after we die, and they're asking whether funerals can be gentler on the planet.
The numbers are striking. In the United States alone, an area the size of Hawaii — about 1.6 million hectares — is cleared of forest each year just to make coffins. That's enough wood to build 4.5 million homes. Add to that roughly 1.6 million tons of cement poured into graves, and cremations that release as much carbon as driving a private car 3,369 kilometers (more than 2,000 miles). In many countries, graveyards are running out of room, adding urgency to the search for alternatives.
Two methods are gaining ground across Europe and beyond. Water cremation, also called alkaline hydrolysis, uses water heated to 170 degrees Celsius (338 Fahrenheit) mixed with an alkali solution. The body gently dissolves, and the remaining bone is dried and ground into a powder, returned to families in an urn. Scotland became the first place in Europe to offer this option when it was introduced in March 2026. It's now being discussed in England and Wales, and is already allowed in Australia, South Africa, Canada, Ireland, and several U.S. states. Scotland's public health minister, Jenni Minto, called it an "environmentally friendly alternative."
The other method is natural organic reduction, or human composting. The body is placed in a sealed container filled with dry materials like hay, straw, or wood chips. Microbes break it down over several weeks, and the resulting soil is returned to the earth. This is already offered in Ireland, Germany, and Australia.
But how do these new options really compare to traditional burial and cremation? A 2023 study by researchers at Linnaeus University in Sweden examined all three methods and found their environmental impacts are actually quite similar. The biggest factor isn't the body itself — it's everything around it. Flowers, coffins, embalming chemicals, and especially transportation of mourners all add up. Interestingly, when crematoria capture the heat they produce and send it into neighborhood heating systems — a common practice in parts of Europe — traditional cremation can actually come out ahead. The lesson from the researchers? Wherever possible, greening the funeral means greening how we travel to it.
As more places explore these options, families are finding new ways to honor both their loved ones and the world they'll leave behind.