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convenience in a box -- and good for the environment, too! |
by D. Trull
Enigma Editor
dtrull@parascope.com
Our higher mental faculties are aware we're supposed to recycle everything, but something deep in the psyche of our disposable consumer culture drives an obsessive-compulsive love of products you use once and then throw away. If there's no muss, no fuss and no messy clean-up, we're all for it -- even at the cost of wrecking the ecosystem with paper plates and styrofoam. There is one single-use consumable good that we're uniformly more reticent about tossing into the landfill, though, and that's the leaky, unreliable gas-guzzlers we call our bodies.
A clever entrepreneur in England is gambling that the human passion for fast, affordable convenience can outweigh our squeamish fear of mortality. What's more, his product is a throwaway alternative to a more durable item which, for a change, has got environmentalists cheering.
This amazing innovation is the Cask-Kit, the quick 'n easy biodegradable coffin of the future (some assembly required).
Ian Vosper drew the inspiration for his Cask-Kits from a television documentary, which reported on a chain of superstores in France that stock everything imaginable under one roof. Even more of a retail monstrosity than America's Sam's Club, this French megalo-mart sells off-the-rack coffins that smart shoppers can stash away for future use. Vosper thought that was a terrific idea, but he noted a couple of problems inherent with its execution.
"There was a man who bought a coffin off the shelf for his own funeral and loaded it into a Renault 5," Vosper said. "But he was having difficulties. I saw how much better it would be it would be if the thing came in kit form."
And so Vosper got out of the kitchen appliances business and founded Eco-F Systems Ltd., in his hometown of St. Ives, Cornwall. He developed a cheap but sturdy wooden coffin that comes packaged flat in an easily portable assembly set. Vosper also designed Cask-Kits to be fully biodegradable and Earth-friendly, constructed primarily of softwood residues and timber industry scrap materials. Five packaged kits occupy the same space as one assembled model, which the company says a person can build in 20 minutes following the enclosed instructions. The coffin can supposedly carry a weight of 800 pounds, but having a maximum width of 24 inches, it's doubtful any occupants will be testing that limit.
Charmingly, the finished Cask-Kit has that cool, six-sided archetypal shape, angled out broad at the shoulders, just exactly like the coffins in cartoons and Dracula movies that you never see in real life. And with an unbeatable pricetag of about $100 each, Cask-Kits are easy on the pocketbook as well as the environment.
Of course, traditional elaborate caskets cost a bazillion times more, what with their bulletproof metal plating and needlessly comfy silk linings. Nonetheless, Vosper has found that British consumers by and large prefer to stick to the lavish and extravagant funeral package, because... well, you know... it just wouldn't seem right to waste any less dough on their dearly departed. Fortunately for Eco-F Systems, there are other parts of the world where people don't have this eccentric hang-up -- or can't afford to -- and it's in the booming export business that Cask-Kits are building a customer base to die for.
President Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico is among Vosper's biggest clients. Zedillo's brother runs a government-subsidized funeral service organization, which helps provide arrangements for poor and underprivileged Mexican citizens. Cask-Kits seemed such a tailor-made fit for the family business that President Zedillo has ordered 600,000 of them. The government of Angola is also planning to become a top customer, hoping to combat a persistent plague of grave-robbers. The target of these thieves is not the corpses or their jewelry, but rather the expensive coffins themselves, which carry a high black-market resale value. Cask-Kits, on the other hand, are so biodegradable that if anyone tries to pull them from a grave, they will fall apart, even after just one hour in the ground. (There's a Lenscrafters slogan joke in there somewhere, but it's not worth digging around for.)
Because of the skyrocketing international success of his business, Vosper is dramatically increasing the size of Eco-F's workforce and manufacturing facilities. He applied for a British government grant to put towards his business expansion, but got turned down -- once again beset by that hoidy-toidy prejudice against a good, honest wooden box for stiffs. Vosper's company has also introduced a line of "Farewell Friends" Cask-Kits for pets, which may actually stand a surer chance at domestic acceptance than the human variety. Sure, we love our late, lamented Fido, but we're not too opposed to burying him on the cheap.
If you're not convinced that the Cask-Kit is the kind of bucket you want to be riding out of this vale of tears, consider this: inside one of those high-toned, armored-steel sarcophagi that refined and civilized persons insist on being entombed in, the airtight environment allows vicious anaerobic bacteria to attack with unmitigated decompositional brawn. In a matter of months, your remains are reduced to a stinky, partially liquefied sludge. Surprisingly, a corpse interred in a wooden coffin can expect a much slower and more natural rate of decay, administered by leisurely mold and easygoing earthworms and whatnot.
Come to think of it, maybe these guys should try marketing a Cask-Kit crematorium urn.
Sources: Cask-Kits web site; The Independent (U.K.); The Straight Dope, Cecil Adams.
(c) Copyright 1997 ParaScope, Inc.
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