Mushroom burial suit turns dead bodies into clean compost (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Mushroom burial suit turns dead bodies into clean compost (2016)

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109 pointsgscott83 comments

Getting human bodies to decompose underground is not trivial. The idea is nice, but I think the idea of a burial forest is much nicer, as it gives an excuse to plant some trees, and provides multiple moral perspectives for not chopping them down again. The burial forest idea is basically that you bury someone, and plant a tree on top, like a tombstone, but, a tombtree, and that tree is then both a memorial for the deceased, and, more importantly, it is a tree, and trees are nice to have around.

How does that work in the long perspective? At one point it either falls over by itself, or it is chopped down? If it falls over by itself, what is done with it then?

Plant a new one? You can maintain a cemetery forest just like a regular one; the dead people aren't going to care, and so long as the forest maintenance is not completely neglected, why would the survivors complain either? It's not like regular tombstones don't erode away with time just like trees would.

I don't know about you, but for me even a fallen tree sounds like a more interesting tomb marker than a slab of stone.

At many graveyards you now lease a grave for a certain number of years, not in perpetuity. Not really much different to that. No idea what they do with the bodies once the lease is up...

Traditionally, the previous occupant is exhumed and their bones deposited in the ossuary building. I imagine a modern cemetery just quietly trashes the headstone when the lease expires, and re-leases the plot at full price, as though no one had already been buried there.

I'm not sure when the gravesite lease for ethical business practice expires.

Apparently in Greece they dig the bodies up after three years and put the bones in an ossuary.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34920068

It will not be chopped down. The idea is to plant a forest which is in some form of the word "sacred", a place that is respected, because it is nature reclaimed, or because it is a resting place of the dead. If a tree falls over (some live many hundreds of years), it will rot and take on its natural role in nature as food for fungus and other life. As people die, the forest grows. It shouldn't be maintained, the land should be considered spent, given back.

Forests and nature in general managed just fine without human intervention, and indeed, us valiantly putting out forest fires have only made forest fires more dangerous as forests are now denser than they'd have been with natural pruning.

You plant two trees, one for the deceased human and one for the dead tree.

... but but then what happens when that tree dies?

Naturally, you plant another tree.

You plant a human

The green burial site we've chosen is a lightly managed forest, without the litter of a traditional graveyard - no headstones, urns, monuments and what not. Just an eco friendly burial, with no embalming first, and optionally a small plaque made of local stone. Flowers are allowed, but they must be just a bunch of flowers without wire, foam, vase or plastic wrap. Wreaths are quietly removed a few days after a burial.

It just looks like a particularly nice bit of native forest, and in a hundred years they aim that it should still just look like forest. They allow and even encourage picnics, walkers, dog walkers.

Surprisingly - well we were - it isn't more expensive than a regular funeral.

Where is this?

You can google "green burial" or "natural burial" for your state. Here some locations in New Jersey: https://web.njsfda.org/public/decisions/ground-burial/green-...

The long term perspective is that the site remains as natural as possible. People who choose to be buried here probably aren't looking for an eternal monument to their existence, but instead are trying to leave this world with as little trace as possible.

I would prefer to be buried with as little environmental impact as possible, so a forest burial seems like a good ide.

Equally as important is that I would prefer a joyful wake, one where friends and family get together and remember all the best times we had together, and to celebrate a life well lived. Have a grand old party in my name, and remember to enjoy the good things in life.

This is what I've always wanted. However, my hope is that in a few hundred years when the tree finally dies, the wind will blow it over and some hiker will find my skeleton tangled in the roots. Ideally it will scare them, it will be my last prank.

Startup idea: ultra durable light-sensing box that can survive hundreds of years underground, then emits a horrible screaming noise when unearthed.

If it also includes spirits like those that fly out in Raiders of the Lost Ark, I'll pre-order it.

Or maybe the opening song of Windows 98...

Now THAT is scary!

https://www.timesnownews.com/international/article/man-murde...

I've seen similar articles a few times. Not to uncommon it seems.

Yes, I recall that one (tragic)! Here's another story that initially gave me the idea:

https://www.cnn.com/2015/09/15/europe/ireland-tree-skeleton-...

If they ever successfully clone dinosaurs, I'd love to be fed to a TRex. That'd make a great tombstone photo for the pedia.

Living or already dead?

If you wait until you're dead, you won't get to experience the splendor of being consumed by a giant reptile.

But if living? Oh man. Giddy up, partner.

You can have yourself fed to their ancestors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial

>Getting human bodies to decompose underground is not trivial.

This is simply not true

Step 1. Do not embalm the body. Step 2. Do not put it in a coffin. Step 3. Bury it.

Overcoming the marketing pressure of the morticians and funerals industry is the non-trivial part. It's like getting engaged without a diamond ring. All you have to do is not buy an expensive thing that nobody needs.

> you bury someone, and plant a tree on top

I also thought about that. It just feels like a nice thing, coming from something deeply ingrained in my mind. I wonder why other people also seem to have the same feeling.

Human bodies naturally decompose on their own, even without a tree. The problem is that no one is burying people unembalmed, everyone insists on mummifying the corpses of their relatives before putting them in the ground and this is just impossible to sustain. Furthermore, they are burying people in these thick, elaborate coffins that take forever to decompose as well.

Lots of people think cremation is environmentally friendly, but they don't realize the amount of fuel being burned and how much carbon it puts into the atmosphere. It's not clean by any stretch of the imagination. They also don't realize that crematoriums are not cleaned well and that they are often not getting the ashes of just their relative but probably other people as well, but that is a separate issue.

The answer is for funeral homes to begin offering expedited burials that use natural preservation techniques on unembalmed bodies. The new expectation would be that the burial occur within 24 hours of death, 48 if absolutely necessary (something that would be inconvenient for funeral preparations, but worth it) and bodies placed in freezers and on dry ice (in the coffin) to prevent decay and odor from setting in.

This works, it's being done in certain parts of the US and in lots of places around the world. My family is Eastern Orthodox Christian and this is the traditional burial method for us. A simple wooden box, an unembalmed body, and into the ground ASAP. Nothing better for the environment than to return yourself to the earth.

Bodies could be put into cold storage if a delay for burial were needed.

Sure, that is definitely an option. But people need to be willing to discuss those options and demand them from funeral services. The problem we have with this entire subject is that most people are not willing to engage with it too seriously because they are disquieted by the idea of mortality itself.

Jews don't embalm. Embalming is only really necessary if you are doing open-casket, which we don't do.

Muslims don't embalm either. Unless the family insists of flying the body to some other location.

We don't embalm, but we also do open casket sometimes (if the body is in good shape), so one strategy that is used is dry ice around the body to keep the temperature as low as possible.

Exactly. Someone I know recently passed away in the UK and they held the funeral service almost two weeks later. This was a surprise to me because where I come from (Korea), everything is over in 2-3 days. That's long enough for relatives to gather even if they're halfway around the world, but short enough for basic cleaning and a refrigerator to keep the body in relatively good shape.

We call it a three-day funeral, but the process can sometimes take as little as 36 hours (death in the evening of first day, burial/cremation in the morning of third day). I think the short funeral also helps the bereaved return to normalcy sooner. There's no time to get used to the funerary mood. You're expected back at work/school/etc. by the fourth day.

To support your point - the Grand Duke of Luxembourg just died (April 23) and was buried May 4.

That's so weird. Consider what is really going on there.

1. They are removing all of this guys body fluids and injecting him with weird preservatives. He's been drained like a hunted animal and is puffed up with fake juices.

2. This person died and they are extending the time between death and burial for the convenience of those attending the funeral, because the death of a human being is somehow a thing we should "work into our schedule" and not expect to be TOO inconvenienced by. Like seriously? What better way to honor this guy than to be like "yeah, I know you died, but can you just hold on a sec because I really need to let my work know I won't be there for that meeting." It's so detached from the reality of what has happened.

I can understand that an exception may be made for monarchs and other prominent individuals. It takes time to organize a funeral on a national scale.

For ordinary people, though, the immediate family is all who matters. To continue to Korean example I mentioned above, it is culturally accepted that you can just drop everything and leave if a family member has died. You don't work the funeral into your schedule; the funeral forces itself into your schedule whether you think you can afford to or not. I think this is a result both of the Confucian tradition (filial duty above everything else) and of the practical necessities of public health (you don't want to keep dead bodies around for too long in a hot and humid country). The flip side of being able to drop everything immediately, of course, is that you're expected back at work as soon as it's over. Either way, social norms need to support this kind of prioritizing in order for most people to adopt quick funerals.

Isn't cremation environmentally-friendly in the sense that it doesn't require additional otherwise-useful land be used for a cemetery? And then it prevents future plane flights/car trips to visit the grave site?

If you don't want people to fly or drive to a funeral, just have a small, local funeral or no funeral at all. That has nothing to do with the way the body is dealt with.

And land shortage is not really an issue in any real sense. Even in a place like China or India you could find enough land to support natural burial practices like I described above. If you begin with the assumption that most people want to be buried, there are plenty of options that can maximize the use of existing land. You can bury more than one person in a single plot over time (as one decomposes, put another in) or you can go deeper and do things like bury people in tunnels. If people want a solution, they can come up with one pretty easily, it's just a matter of actually trying.

I never saw cremation as environmentally friendly. I won't to feed worms and trees when I die, not turn to CO2 and heat up the atmosphere.

My plan for years now has been to get buried in a wicker coffin in a forest. Not an enclosed coffin, no embalming, no neat graveyard, just as natural as possible underground with a tree on top.

> I won't to feed worms and trees when I die, not turn to CO2 and heat up the atmosphere.

If you're buried won't you turn into methane and then CO2 anyway?

I don't know that much about decay processes, I'm afraid. I'm kinda hoping to turn to worm food, whatever that is.

Still, animals die and decay in the wild, they don't get cremated in the wild[0]. That suggests to me it's the more natural and sustainable way to end.

[0] Except in forest fires, I suppose.

I don't need my own tree, and I don't think most people who go this route would need one either. Just dump me in the woods somewhere. I don't care if anybody knows the specific location.

The problem, I see, is overcrowding. It's not really a quality forest if you constantly have to dig holes for new bodies.

Not to mention that, huh..., wildboars love to dig and eat carrion so you need some kind of case, (or at least a reusable and temporal heavy metal plank). You will make a dog really happy for a while at least.

I assume this is coming up again because it was recently announced that celebrity Luke Perry was buried in a mushroom suit:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/04/entertainment/luke-perry-mush...

Liquification is another method, essentially pressure cooked in a lye solution.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaline_hydrolysis_(body_di...

Not much can beat a sky burial. Tibetians sometimes still do it. If you search around, you can find a photo sequence documenting it. The only notable modernization is plastic aprons for the workers. They strip and slash the body, then step back and let vultures eat. After the vultures have left only large bones, the workers smash up the bones with a bit of oatmeal in a bowl. The vultures like that too, ultimately leaving nothing uneaten.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis

I went to a place where they did that when I was younger. We were visiting a monastery and were told to be respectful because there was a sky burial going on while we were there. We decided to just look around but to keep away from the ceremony. I was really out of it with altitude sickness so I was just sitting looking down at this gorgeous valley near the bus, while the people I was with went to look around the monastery. Then I could see all these vultures flying away with little bits of meat. Very surreal experience.

Some skydivers will have "ash dives." Your body is cremated, ashes placed into a specially designed pouch, and friends take you up on a final skydive. Everyone exits, joins up in a formation with your pouch making up one of the links, and at some point in free fall the pouch gets opened. You're quickly scattered to the ends of the earth from a couple miles up.

Even though there's no cremation involved, Tibetan sky burial sort of reminds me of that.

I hope my pals use my corpse for some cubensis when I'm ripe for it.

How is this Mushroom method compare to the leading green cremation of Alkaline Hydrolysis that has been around for over 130 years?[1]

[1]: https://www.frazerconsultants.com/2016/06/dissolved-bodies-s...

I'm surprised sea burials aren't more of a thing. Much the same but easier to deal with the body really.

The boat serves as a function room so is set-up ready to go always and has business model flexibility if you want to take people out for a harbour cruise other days.

> I'm surprised sea burials aren't more of a thing

I have friends who started a small boat tour company and found that sea burials made up quite a large proportion of their business. They were jokingly wondering whether to pivot and call their new company "The Final Wave".

For more somber traditionalists, overboard the body in a No Wake Zone.

I guess people want a specific place to visit and remember.

Which requires a body present?

Novelist brain is now feverishly working out ways to use this in a crime novel. (Probably one involving a smart serial killer.)

There was an episode of Hannibal where this sort of thing was part of the plot - using bodies to grow fungi.

Shades of "The Expanse" and "Silo" series. IIRC Wool, etc.. had people being decomposed right back into the farm area, and the Expanse has bodies being fed into the "recycler".

Was also a TED Talk on this.

https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee/

Edit: looks like it is linked in the article too.

On a related note, the state of Washington is about to legalize human composting -- https://thecompost.io/articles/the-kids-arent-alright#compos...

The article claims the mushrooms break down heavy metals. How do they do that?

I know there are marine bacteria that can convert mercury into a less toxic form, but I am surprised some mushrooms can convert ALL the toxic heavy metals in our bodies into something less toxic.

According to Wikipedia on the lead designer:

> She earned a B.A. degree in psychology from Wellesley College (1998) and an M.S. degree in visual studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006).

My bet is that this doesn't really work, or, well, maybe it does, in the exact same way a buried dead body eventually decomposes.

That was my first thought. If a body is not pumped full of preservatives, it would surely grow all sort of fungus and bacteria like any other dead aminal buried in the ground.

I can give away the entire game here. I was in her class when Jae-Rhim designed this project. It was a class taught by [sic] Kzysztof Wodczizco called "Interrogative Design." He was at MIT then and is at Harvard now. [a]

The whole point of Kzyzstof's Interrogative Design practice is to design something half-ass and make it seem serious as hell to get people talking and improving the idea. It "asks a question." It's not taking the piss out of the audience, because the audience is already lulled into a consumer trance of evaluating every possible purchase and can generally be led into doing the problem-solving work. In fact, it's mainly taking the piss out of the artists because half the time they think their design will actually work.

Wodiczko has incredible cache from being part of the resistance to Communism in Poland. He impressed me, but made me incredibly cynical. Like many designers, he practiced an ideology that brought his audience so close to understanding life through aesthetic and psychological principles (bit of Jung, bit of Deleuze, bit of Steve Jobs), but ultimately left them cold, positioning himself as a thought leader, expecting the rest of the world to complete his projects, using their imagination and the money he gets from universities. For instance, when I took the class, he was obsessed with Moses and viewed the bible as a design exercise. He wanted us to come up with something as persuasive as the stone tablets. I guess I'm just another idealistic geek who thinks technical facts matter and people can do the right thing without being led around by fairie tales.

[a] https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/person/krzysztof-wodiczko/

The next generation of laziness? Fake Itt Til Someone Else Makes It.

They don't. Mycelium can decompose some very complex carbohydrates like oils spills, but that's as far as they go.

They will, however, absorve and concentrate those heavy metals. You would need to remove the mushrooms and dispose or recycle the heavy metals. It's worth to mention that such suit could be a health hazard if people would eat the mushrooms of the decomposing body.

- https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0cf9/889e0d096b66a1c9300114...

The article just says it cleanses the body of them. I assume that means it just takes up the heavy metals.

Or have someone lay out your corpse on the ground, cover it with staked-down chicken wire to keep large scavengers from moving the body around, and dump some Dermestid beetles on it to accelerate the process. Between the beetles and the corpse flies that show up naturally, the soft tissues pupate, molt, and fly away a few grams at a time, leaving a cleaned skeleton.

I'm putting that in my next testament, along with artfully arranging the bones in a clear polyurethane casting resin, so that I can creep out generations of my descendants as a plastic heirloom.

If this interests you, Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets is an interesting dissertation on how mushrooms can "save the planet." His TED talks are a decent intro as well.

Interesting Start Trek: Discovery homage I didn't know until reading this: the Discovery ship runs in a form of subspace called "mycelial network", using a "mycelium drive", whose inventor is called... "Paul Stamets".

We need new rituals in our society. I want my body to be eaten using dermestide beetles to clean my bones http://beetlestobonesskullcleaning.com/

We need to punish people that do environmental damage, like use embalm chemicals.

Human bodies decompose on their own. Just bury. Muslims have been doing that for over a thousand years and it just works.

It's one of those things that we (specially the west) are over-engineering. Same goes for using paper in restrooms. I am waiting for the west to evolve and just use water already.

I don't see how mushrooms can get rid of heavy metals as said in the article.

They don't "get rid" of heavy metals in any absolute sense, but they do remove them from the environment, concentrating the metals within the fruit bodies of the fungus where they can be easily "harvested" and processed to either recover the metals or sequester them from the rest of the environment.

Fungi are also spectacularly good at remediating hydrocarbon-polluted soils and related material - even deeply polluted sites that are normally just fenced off and "forgotten" as toxic-waste sites.

Take a look at some of Paul Stamets's talks on your favourite Tube site.

I was hoping for pictures, but the company page for the Infinity Burial Suit sells t-shirts! I can't think of a better gift for the Goth in someone's life.

I want to be buried in terra preta wearing a mushroom suit.

This is beautiful. I can't think of a better way to go. Mushrooms are the best!

what is the solution to deal with all of the inorganic/e-waste that are in most people's bodies these days (pacemakers, artificial hips, etc.)

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