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You are in: Home > > Go Green Even If You’re Dead: ARKA Ecopod

Go Green Even If You’re Dead: ARKA Ecopod

22 by Doug Gunzelmann on August 30, 2008

ecopod

Ah sweet afterlife! We love eco-friendly death. There's no excuses to not be green these days, even if you're dead you can still minimize your impact. The Ecopod is a compressed recycled paper coffin designed by Hazel Selina. Hazel has been highly involved in natural birthing processes for much of her life and as the years toil past she has turned her focus to a pressing issue...death. The Ecopod along with the Acorn urn are made from 100% recycled paper and a natural earth based mineral hardener. They are completely biodegradable just like you (unless you're pumped full of embalming fluids)! You can have your Ecopod silk screened with designs such as doves or a Celtic cross.

ecopod

ecopod

The AKRA Acorn Urn is made via the same process as the Ecopod.

ecopod

The Ecopod comes in an array of colors, some fit for a pharaoh.

ecopod

ecopod

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About the Author:

Doug is in perpetual motion and a self-proclaimed adventure junkie, that has had a longtime love affair with the great outdoors.

“I love being a part of the active world. The stuff that blows my hair back is adventure (all shapes and sizes), photography, mountaineering, Muay Thai, and seeing natural beauty in all its forms. The living earth is the framework on which I build my life and free time. My ideal trip would be BASE jumping at Sotano de Las Golandrinas in Mexico (closest I could come to skydiving through the jungle!). I work towards keeping it real, green, and healthy. ”

Doug is the co-founder of LiveOAK, although he says he didn’t know what a blog was until a couple months after he started.

Twitter Follow Doug Gunzelmann on Twitter: @amazonpilgrim
  • Clark

    Wow! What an innovative idea. It’s clear that the ‘green’ movement is expanding its bounds. I hope that we, as consumers, will take particular heed to support eco-friendly business models. For example, http://www.simplestop.net stops your postal junk mail and benefits the environment.

  • http://url.ie/h1b?681097953/681097953681097953/681097953/681097953/681097953/681097953 design

    That is amazingly cool.

    And yes, I am morbid.

  • Webroamer

    OK this is truly cool, but why spend the extra doe to paint it- it is only going to get buried. I think that if this company is still around when I need them this is the way I’m going to go. (and then paint it myself)

  • infidelnc

    I really like the idea, but the pods look like a chrysalis…is this saying something about the afterlife?

  • tina

    love the shape and the idea – not bad

  • http://designzen.wordpress.com/ zen

    in the name of green…goes green even your are dead..nice idea

  • http://hungryghoast.tumblr.com Ghoast

    Ok, great idea but…
    when you get “embalmed” they pump you full of nasty and no good chemicals
    then, once you’re in the ground they incase you in concrete…
    so unless you can get around those things (and if you can, then awesome) then this isn’t going to make a difference

  • GDM

    Of course these are really only as green as the means by which the money used to purchase them was acquired, and then as green as whatever that money is then used to purchase and so on. This whole concept of ecoluxury is a sham. Also coloring and designing them is completely unnecessary and wasteful of whatever resources go into the process–it’s postmortem vanity.

  • Uncle B

    Corpses should go to the renderer’s and be made into bio-diesel. The bones should be processed into fertilizer and any other recoverables, such as hair and skin, should be processed into re-usable products. All of this should be done by a large multi-national corporation, subsidized by at least, the Bush administration, and owned and operated by ‘private’ international (Think Arab) big money investors. Bills preventing competition, based on Red tape bull shit and legalese should be lobbied for by the likes of Tom Delay and Abramson, and we should all applaud the clean efficient way the neo-cons have made even our death something they can give to their children, or squander on new body parts available only to the uber-rich , from live donors from China and India, on huge hospital luxury liners, located on the high seas and fully secured by the U.S. military. Why quibble? They have stolen our lives, the lives of our children and the future of the nation. Let them have our deaths also.

  • ash

    I think this is a really great idea and disagree with some of the criticism.

    New products almost always go to the rich first, and though it’s a shame the really good ideas will trickle down. It’s the nature of the business and the person who put all the work into the idea has to pay the bills, too – it’s expensive to start something new.

    Also, why not paint the coffin? Water and plant based paints can biodegrade right along along with the rest of it, and I doubt it has so much to do with “postmortem vanity” as the deceased’s loved ones wanting to celebrate the life with one final unique expression of beauty as a send-off. It’s what people have been doing since the dawn of humanity to help them cope and find comfort in the mysteries of death.

    I applaud any effort to return the nutrients in our bodies to the earth rather lock it up in a coffin. This is a fabulous start. I’m just bummed I didn’t come up with it myself – it would have made a killer senior thesis project :)

  • Gwawdiwr

    This is actually a pretty poor idea. Far better to bury the dead in plain wooden coffins – takes an awful lot less energy to make them than these papier mache monstrosities. [Go and google for the embodied energy in paper if you disagree - you'll find that it takes about 20MJ to make 1kg of paper, but 1kg of wood takes less than 2MJ to grow/harvest/process. When they break down, the impacts are comparable. So plain wood is clearly a better option.]

    The point made by the person who wants to render the dead to make biodiesel from them also fails to take account of the lifecycle costs. If you really wanted to recover the energy from people, I would suggest that anaerobic digestion is a better option – you can then use the dead to give you carbon-neutral biogas plus an organic fertiliser. However, I imagine that societal conventions will get in the way here – it’s possibly a bit taboo :-)

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  • gaelle

    it’s humor, isn’t it? I like it. really.

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