No, it’s not a picnic basket. It’s a woven willow coffin.

Gives new meaning to going green. If you want to die really green, you can first arrange to be embalmed with ultra-low impact chemicals, then buried in a casket, urn, shroud, or container made of sustainable and biodegradable material such as woven willow, oak, or ash, grown and coppiced on a sustainable basis onto which no fake veneers, toxic varnishes or glues have been added, and which can be lined with pure, unbleached, organic cotton. If you would just rather skip the whole burial thing and be cremated, you can specify that your body be placed in a biodegradable plastic body bag and to ensure that no harmful gases or toxins are emitted.

It looks like a triple width file box, but it’s a recycled cardboard coffin.

The non-profit Green Building Council, founded in 2005, has developed a certification program to bring about a new ethic in death care rooted in transparency, accountability, and ecological responsibility. They aim to reduce the carbon emissions, waste, and the use of toxic chemicals in the cemetery/funeral field by utilizing burial as a means of acquiring, restoring and stewarding natural areas. An international network of “approved providers” is available on their website.

If you’ve got something about worms so having any part of you left in the earth seems unappealing to you but you’d still like a natural resting place, then you can consider an undersea burial in a memorial reef provided by an organization such as The Neptune Society and Eternal Reefs.

The Neptune Memorial Reef Undersea Garden