‘Are You Waste or Compost?’ Eco-coffins, Green Burial and the Frontiers of Neoliberalism

This article analyses innovative burial products linked to emergent modes of ‘eco’ death-styling. It focuses, specifically, on producers of sustainable coffins designed to prevent the environmental impacts of the dead and, instead, to make the corpse an agent of positive environmental renewal. Operating within the digital marketplace and presenting themselves as a green alternative to ‘industrial’ forms of bodily disposal, these producers offer novel funeral commodities to the ecologically responsible consumer contemplating death. We identify a tension, in the marketing discourses associated with these products, between a genuine concern with sustainability and complicity with a neoliberal ideology which sees ‘green consumerism’ and individualised ‘choices’ as the ‘solution’ to climate breakdown and ecological crisis. ‘Eco’ coffins provide, it is claimed, instruments for the management of post-mortem corporeality, extending neoliberal practices of biopolitical self-regulation into and after death. Similarly, the designers of these products position themselves as entrepreneurial agents disrupting the funeral market and transforming attitudes to death and our relation to nature. Although they offer a critique of the harms associated with the ‘conventional’ funeral industry, their ‘start-up’ ethos aligns them with the free-market orientation of Silicon Valley ideology. Although they effectively merge aesthetic appeal, innovative design and sustainability, eco coffins are commodities, proffered to ‘eco-sensitive’ consumers in the Global North, their production and circulation evidence of how ‘capitalism extracts value from domains that were previously not perceived as elements of the sphere of economic activity – social interactions, the body, life… from death and the dead.’