What if instead of visiting a field of headstones, you visited a sacred forest or garden where your dead relatives and friends were buried in the form of trees and plants?  What if you could pick a plant or tree to become after you die?

Earlier this year, eco-friendly burials became a rather popular idea after the Capsula Mundi Project launched.  Italian designers, Anna Citeli and Raoul Bretzel, have developed a new way  to bury a loved ones remains in a pod to give nutrients to a tree or plant.  They have created burial pods for those that don’t want to be cremated; based off of the already existing bios urns for those who do want to be cremated.

The burial pods are in the shape of an egg, made completely of biodegradable materials in which the dead body is put in a fetal position.  The pod is then planted in the ground like a seed and buried. Some distance above the pod, a tree sapling of your choice is planted. The options of what tree is only dependent on the climate in which you are buried in.

The bios urns are designed so that the ashes go in a cup-like pot with a smaller pot that gets inserted at the top. The smaller pot is filled with a soil mix and planted with any seed of your picking. It has an expansion disc in it that deteriorates slowly over time, allowing the soil to mix with the ashes.

Hopefully, with such environmentally friendly burial choices, we can help build up forests again and use this as a unique way of burying loved ones.  Personally, I think this is a really neat idea, but I’m not sure that I would want to be buried in an egg.