“Bury People to Save Land”: Death Care Reimagined
10.28.22
Never known for his fashion sense while living, President Lincoln settled the score in death, becoming the first significant public figure to undergo embalmment. His funeral train — a journey of marathon proportions that covered 1,700 miles in fourteen days — transfixed a million plus spectators and kicked off a national trend that would last for over 160 years.
“I saw him in his coffin. He was the same as in life. Death had not changed the kindly countenance in any line,” remarked one impressed spectator, who must have observed him early on in the tour (by New York, things had started to get grisly).
“Prior to this event, the majority of Americans opposed embalming in any form, believing that it represented a pagan practice,” writes death care researcher Olivia Lott of the University of Washington. “Lincoln’s funerary tour essentially amounted to a promotional tour for the practice of embalming. For, as people viewed Lincoln resting peacefully in his casket, ‘more than a few must have noted that he looked a whole lot better in his casket than Grandmama had looked in hers.’”
Besides allowing for celebrity death tours, embalmment provided another logistical miracle: getting fallen soldiers’ bodies back home to their families still intact. Invented in Europe in the 1830s, embalming was imported to the battlefields of the Civil War by entrepreneur Thomas H. Holmes. “He claimed to have embalmed more than 4,000 bodies in just four years, focusing on those of officers whose families he knew were able to pay his $100 charge,” writes Darryl Roberts in Profits of Death. Whatever the actual body count, his profits soon attracted a slew of “sanitary scientists,” and by the 1890s, embalming had replaced natural burials as the dominant form of preservation practice.
Today, the death care industry is undergoing a similar period of rapid transition, with cremation expected to account for 70% of services by 2030, as President Lincoln’s interment choice finally falls out of fashion (in 2021, the US cremation rate was 57.5%, up by 1.4% from 2020). Private equity, enticed by the fragmented landscape and the prospect of 73 million waning Baby Boomers, has moved to roll-up the funeral home and cemetery industries, particularly those establishments with high cremation rates.
“Is that sort of pickled, shellacked, cosmetized, preserved corpse where the future will be?” said Victoria Haneman, a Creighton University of Law Professor who studies the funeral home industry. “I don’t know that the answer is ‘yes,’ and I think there are investors who are betting that it’s not.” This week, we discuss the evolving death care industry, a space increasingly challenged by consumers — especially those wayward Baby Boomers — to provide greener, cheaper, and more surprising options.
Graveyard Economics
Death care in the United States is built around perpetual care — the legal requirement that burial grounds are preserved into perpetuity. In other countries, such as Germany and Belgium, no eternity-based infrastructure exists: after 15 years, family members are given the choice of burying the remains further down beneath a new body or moving the remains to a more space-efficient communal grave. “Once grandma has had her time to decompose, her bones need to step aside for a whole new generation of rotting corpses,” said Caitlin Doughty, death care educator and author of From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death.
We spoke to Ralph Little, a cemetery operator in South Florida, about the peculiar American regulations surrounding death care. “Most regulatory agencies prohibit a mortgage being put on a cemetery — the theory being that if a bank were to foreclose and wants to sell to a real estate developer, you’d have to dig up grandma and move her somewhere else. We get around that by the company giving one first lien on stock in the company and any parts of the cemetery that are not dedicated to interment purposes, but that eliminates a lot of traditional bank lenders.”
Another reason some cemeteries seek alternative sources of capital is the impact of perpetual care on cash flow: for every sale the cemetery makes, 10% must be squirreled away into a Perpetual Care Trust. “We’ll take 20% down from a customer and finance the rest over three to five years,” said Little. “On top of that, we have to pay commissions to our salespeople and account for the Perpetual Care Trust allotment, so that keeps the cash flow from a particular sale down and spread out over a larger number of years than typical businesses.”
But the rise of cremation, he says, has been a boon for the business. Although cremations provide less high margin sales than traditional burials (their chief appeal is cost savings), they offer better yields in terms of space efficiency, granting cemeteries significantly longer life spans. Whereas traditional burials “collectively bury enough steel to construct another Golden Gate Bridge, and enough concrete to build a 2-lane highway stretching from New York to Detroit” each year, cremations require a fraction of the space and raw materials.
They also offer more personalized memorial spaces for families — permanent, glass front niches are transforming former mausoleums into an interactive experience more akin to visiting a public museum than a graveyard. “The beauty of a glass front niche is it’s like a shop window you can dress up however you’d like,” said Little. “You can tell the story of a loved one with pictures, mementoes, notes, etc. And when hundreds of them are taken together, it makes for an interesting visit. I’ve seen wings of mausoleums arranged as if you’re in the library of an English manor — with the fireplace, the leather sofas, the Persian rugs… but all four walls are glass front niches. It’s pretty cool.”
SCI, the largest public conglomerate of death care services in the world (representing 15–16% of the North American market), lists “remaining relevant to the consumer” as a key strategy in generating future revenue growth. Once described by its CEO as “the True Value Hardware of the funeral services industry,” the company now recognizes the growing impetus for product innovation. “Baby Boomers are redefining the traditional funeral by transitioning away from solemnly mourning a death to a personalized celebration of life ceremony,” writes the company in its latest 10-K. “In each stage of life, Baby Boomers have set new trends, transformed society, and redefined norms, and we anticipate the impact will be the same for our industry.”
The Eco-Death Movement
What might these new trends look like? Beyond cremation, there is a burgeoning eco-death movement that is interested in exploring more natural and less harmful methods of decay, including body composting, water cremation, and natural burial. Katrina Spade, founder of Seattle’s Recompose, the world’s first body composting facility, is proud to produce a product “much like the topsoil you’d buy at your local nursery.”
She sees a growing demand for services that give something back to the environment rather than leaving behind a toxic “Fort Knox under the earth.” “There’s a growing realization of climate change, coupled with this incredible cohort of baby boomers — 10,000 Americans turn 65 every day — who are approaching the end of their life or seeing someone go through death and thinking, ‘Is this really the best we can do?’ This is a generation that’s really good at saying ‘Wait a minute, we can do better than this.’”
Even the purported benefits of cremation are coming under closer scrutiny. Spade compares traditional burial to driving a Hummer, cremation to driving a Prius, and body composting to riding a bike. Cremation releases large amounts of natural gas, equivalent to more than 70,000 cars driving the roads for a year. In 2005, the UK’s Environmental Agency found that the burning of dental fillings accounted for 16% of the nation’s mercury pollution, a toxic metal particularly harmful to children.
Water cremation, on the other hand, offers significant energy and carbon reduction, while costing roughly the same as cremation. First developed in the US for use on radioactive rabbits, the chemical process utilizes 95% water and 5% potassium hydroxide to reduce the body to “a sterile liquid that looks like weak tea” and pure white bone. The process uses just 1/8 of the energy of flame-based cremation and emits a quarter of the carbon emissions. “Burning grandma in fire seems to be violent,” says one advocate. “In contrast, green cremation is [like] putting grandma in a warm bath.”
But the new practice has not been without its detractors. In 2018, the Missouri Catholic Bishops issued a statement to express their opposition to water cremation, arguing that it “fails to show due reverence for and respect for the human remains of the deceased by subjecting the soft tissue and vital organs to be flushed into the sewer system.” Still, proponents point out that the same could be said for seepage after burial and for cremation through rain.
Finally, many cemeteries are offering a hybrid form of natural burial — devoting a portion of the property to interring unembalmed bodies in an easily biodegradable container. Freddie Johnson, executive director of the Green Burial Association, describes natural burial as a “return to rationality.” Others see natural burial grounds as a strategic tool for protecting land. Billy and Kimberley Campbell, co-founders of Ramsey Creek Preserve, the United States’ first natural burial ground, started the burial ground with wildlife preservation in mind. “Our original intention was to bury people to save land,” said Billy. “The best examples of tall grass prairie left, in places like Iowa, were all cemeteries… If by accident a cemetery can save significant biodiversity elements, why couldn’t you do it by design?”
Thanks to the perpetual care standard of the United States, conservation burial grounds essentially become hallowed ground, protected from development into perpetuity. “It’s like chaining yourself to a tree post-mortem!” says Doughty. Indeed, the local paper quickly branded Ramsey Creek Preserve as “a tree hugger’s heaven,” and one prominent citizen protested its opening, exclaiming “we don’t want to drink your deadman’s soup!”
While these fears are unfounded — “deceased human remains harbor virtually no harmful or transmissible pathogens that may leach out into groundwater systems” — the industry remains dominated by hybrid models since regulations are so cumbersome for true conservation habitats.
Water Cremation Needs A Celebrity Influencer
So far, body composting is legal in four states (Washington, Vermont, Colorado, and Oregon), and California just approved AB 351, which will legalize the process in 2027. Water cremation is legalized for pets in all fifty states and has been approved for humans in nineteen, with several additional states pending legislation.
It may take another celebrity death on the scale of Lincoln’s, however, to give the movement true momentum. “Bio cremation requires a major PR campaign,” writes Lott. “Many view the process as disrespectful, treating humans as nothing more than liquid waste, to be flushed down the drain, despite the fact that if your loved ones’ corpse is embalmed, their bodily fluids literally go straight down the drain.” In New York, for example, a push to bring bio-cremation to the state was defeated in 2008 after legislators branded it “The Hannibal Lecter Bill.”
So, until Joe Biden volunteers himself for bio cremation, most consumers will have to settle for embalmment, fire-based cremation, or good old natural burial. “If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture — that is immortality enough for me,” concludes Doughty. “And as much as anyone deserves.”
About Colbeck: Colbeck is a strategic lender that partners with companies during periods of transition, providing creative capital solutions to meet their evolving needs. You can reach the team at inquiries@colbeck.com.
