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Netherlands: Mushroom Coffins Turn Bodies into Compost

This handout picture released by the biotech company Loop on September 15, 2020 shows the "living cocoon", a coffin made from mycelium which allows a fast-composting of the body. (Photo by Handout / Loop Biotech / AFP)
This handout picture released by the biotech company Loop on September 15, 2020 shows the "living cocoon", a coffin made from mycelium which allows a fast-composting of the body. (Photo by Handout / Loop Biotech / AFP)
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Netherlands: Mushroom Coffins Turn Bodies into Compost

This handout picture released by the biotech company Loop on September 15, 2020 shows the "living cocoon", a coffin made from mycelium which allows a fast-composting of the body. (Photo by Handout / Loop Biotech / AFP)
This handout picture released by the biotech company Loop on September 15, 2020 shows the "living cocoon", a coffin made from mycelium which allows a fast-composting of the body. (Photo by Handout / Loop Biotech / AFP)

In the Netherlands you can keep helping the planet after you die -- by opting for a living coffin made of mushrooms which speeds up the decomposition of your body.

The coffin turns corpses into compost that enriches the soil thanks to mycelium, the root structure of fungi.

The "Living Cocoon" is a world first, according to Bob Hendrikx, who invented the idea in his student laboratory at Delft Technical University.

"This is the world's first living coffin, and actually last Saturday the first human being in the Netherlands was composted and returned into the cycle of life," he told AFP.

The coffin was the final resting place for an 82-year-old woman, whose body will decompose within two to three years.

If a traditional coffin with varnished wood and metal handles is used, the process normally takes more than ten years.

The casket itself will meanwhile disappear within 30 to 45 days.

"It's actually an organism, so it's made from mycelium which is the root structure of mushrooms," Hendrikx said. "They're the biggest recyclers in nature".

"This is the most natural way to do it... we no longer pollute the environment with toxins in our body and all the stuff that goes into the coffins but actually try to enrich it and really be compost for nature."

The coffin is the same size and shape as a classic coffin but its pale color is typical of mycelium.

Inside is a bed of moss where the body -- and various insects and other soil creatures -- will lie.

Overall the coffin is much lighter than a wooden casket. It's also cheaper, currently costing around 1,500 euros.

Making the coffins requires a bit of foraging, first for moss from the forest, then collecting mycelium from mushrooms, and then mixing that with woodchips.

"Slowly in seven days, it's actually pretty fast, it will grow into a solid material that is actually an organism," said Hendrikx.

"Afterwards it's naturally dried by literally removing the mould and just letting it be. So then the mycelium, the organism, becomes inactive.

"When it's in the ground, it starts to get activated again when a lot of moisture hits the organism. Then it starts the decomposition process."

Hendrikx's inspiration didn't stem from a ghoulish fascination with bodies or human compost, but from serendipity.

Fascinated by the applications of mushrooms, he first tried to make a "living house" for his thesis.

But when someone asked what would happen with the body of his grandmother if he left her inside the house, Hendrikx had a brainwave.

That has now become a start-up, called Loop, which has signed a deal with a funeral home, while also causing a stir on social media.

"Looking at the reactions we had online, we're pretty sure it's going to be a big hit," he said.

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Varieties

Jimmy Carter's Woodworking, Painting and Poetry Reveal an Introspective Renaissance Man

(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)
(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)
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Jimmy Carter's Woodworking, Painting and Poetry Reveal an Introspective Renaissance Man

(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)
(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)

The world knew Jimmy Carter as a president and humanitarian, but he also was a woodworker, painter and poet, creating a body of artistic work that reflects deeply personal views of the global community — and himself.
His portfolio illuminates his closest relationships, his spartan sensibilities and his place in the evolution of American race relations. And it continues to improve the finances of The Carter Center, his enduring legacy, The Associated Press said.
Creating art provided “the rare opportunity for privacy” in his otherwise public life, Carter said. “These times of solitude are like being in another very pleasant world.”
‘One of the best gifts of my life' Mourners at Carter’s hometown funeral will see the altar cross he carved in maple and collection plates he turned on his lathe. Great-grandchildren in the front pews at Maranatha Baptist Church slept as infants in cradles he fashioned.
The former president measured himself a “fairly proficient” craftsman. Chris Bagby, an Atlanta woodworker whose shop Carter frequented, elevated that assessment to “rather accomplished.”
Carter gleaned the basics on his father’s farm, where the Great Depression meant being a jack-of-all-trades. He learned more in shop class and with Future Farmers of America. “I made a miniature of the White House,” he recalled, insisting it was not about his ambitions.
During his Navy years, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter chose unfurnished military housing to stretch his $300 monthly wage, and he built their furniture himself in a shop on base.
As president, Carter nurtured woodworking rather than his golf game, spending hours in a wood shop at Camp David to make small presents for family and friends. And when he left the White House, West Wing aides and Cabinet members pooled money for a shopping spree at Sears, Roebuck & Co. so he could finally assemble a full-scale home woodshop.
“One of the best gifts of my life,” Carter said.
Working in their converted garage, he previewed decades of Habitat for Humanity work by refurbishing their one-story house in Plains. He also improved his fine woodworking skills, joining wood without nails or screws. He also bought Japanese carving tools, and fashioned a chess set later owned by a Saudi prince.
Not just any customer Carter frequented Atlanta’s Highland Woodworking, a shop replete with a library of how-to books and hard-to-find tools, and recruited the world’s preeminent handmade furniture maker, Tage Frid, as an instructor, Bagby said.
Still hanging near the store entrance is a picture of Frid, who died in 2004, teaching students including a smiling former president at the front of the class.
“He was like a regular customer,” Bagby said, other than the “Secret Service agents who came with him.”
Carter built four ladder-back chairs out of hickory in 1983, and Sotheby’s auctioned them for $21,000 each at the time, the first of many sales of Carter paintings and furniture that raised millions to benefit The Carter Center.
It was rarely about the money, though. Jill Stuckey, a longtime friend who would have the Carters over to her home in Plains, recalled seeing the former president carrying out one of her chairs.
“I said, ‘What are you doing?’” she recalled. “He said, ‘It’s broken. I’m going to take it home and fix it.’”
He was at her back door at 7:30 the next morning, holding her repaired chair.
Carter compared woodworking to the results of his labor as a Navy engineer, or as a boy on the farm: “I like to see what I have done, what I have made.”
‘No special talent,' but his paintings drive auctions Carter employed a folk-art style as a late-in-life amateur painter and claimed “no special talent,” but a 2020 Carter Center auction drew $340,000 for his painting titled “Cardinals," and his oil-on-canvas of an eagle sold for $225,000 in 2023, months after he entered hospice care.
Carter’s work hangs throughout the center’s campus. A room where he met with dignitaries is encircled with birds he painted after he and Rosalynn took on bird watching as a hobby.
Near the executive offices are a self-portrait and a painting of Rosalynn in their early post-presidential years, hanging across from a trio of Andy Warhol prints showing Carter in office.
Carter’s earliest years predominate, with boyhood farm scenes and portraits of influential figures like his father James Earl Carter Sr., whose death in 1953 led him to abandon a Navy career and eventually enter politics in Georgia.
Some of his subjects, including both of his parents, are looking away. Carter's likeness of his mother shows “Miss Lillian” as a 70-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in India. Jason Carter said the piece was particularly meaningful to his grandfather, who lost reelection at a relatively youthful 56.
“When he got out of the White House, she was standing there saying, ’Well, I turned 70 in the Peace Corps. What are you going to do?” Jason Carter said.
One Carter subject who meets his gaze is a young Rosalynn — they married when she was 18 and he was 21. He described her as “remarkably beautiful, almost painfully shy, obviously intelligent, and yet unrestrained in our discussions.”
Another who doesn’t look away is Rachel Clark, a Black sharecropper who had hosted the future president after they worked in the fields. “Except for my parents, Rachel Clark was the person closest to me,” Carter wrote of his childhood.
'Just a word of praise' Carter wrote more than 30 books — even a novel — but was most introspective in poetry.
On his first real recognition of Jim Crow segregation: “A silent line was drawn between friend and friend, race and race.”
On his Cold War submarine’s delicate dance with enemies: “We wanted them to understand ... to share our love of solitude ... the peace we yearned to keep.”
Rosalynn’s smile, he gushed, silenced the birds, “or may be I failed to hear their song.”
Perhaps Carter’s most revealing poem, “I Wanted to Share My Father’s World,” concerns the man who never got to see his namesake son’s achievements. He wrote that he despised Earl’s discipline, and swallowed hunger for “just a word of praise.”
Only when he brought his own sons to visit his dying father did he “put aside the past resentments of the boy” and see “the father who will never cease to be alive in me.”