Mushroom coffin Australia: Loop Living Cocoon creates mushroom coffin used in Blue Mountains funeral

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust — and, in this case, mushrooms to soil.

Australia has recorded an unusual funeral first, with a woman in her 70s becoming the first person in the country to be farewelled in a coffin grown from mushrooms.

Carolyn, whose family asked for her surname to be withheld, was laid to rest at Springwood Cemetery in the Blue Mountains on Friday following a service in Faulconbridge.

While mushroom and coffin are not two words usually found in the same sentence, the unusual farewell was fitting for Carolyn, according to her husband Donald.

“It feels very true to who she was that even after her death, she can still do something for others while giving something back to nature,” he told The Age.

The coffin is known as the Loop Living Cocoon and, rather than being built from traditional timber, is quite literally grown.

Developed in the Netherlands, it combines hemp fibres sourced from agricultural waste with mycelium, the underground, root-like network produced by fungi.

The mixture is placed around a mould and left in carefully controlled conditions, where nature does most of the heavy lifting.

“The organism grows in seven days into the shape of that mould, which is of course the shape of the coffin, and that’s how we grow mushroom coffins,” Loop Biotech founder and chief executive Bob Hendrikx said.

And its job does not end at burial.

“We are trying to create a cocoon that’s actually biodegradable. In ideal conditions, in 45 days it will be one with the soil, and instead of polluting the earth, it is enriching the soil.”

It might sound like a niche final request, but environmentally friendly funerals are becoming increasingly popular.

Grace Funerals managing director and Funerals Australia national president Asha Dooley said interest in sustainable farewells had noticeably grown during her 15 years in the industry, particularly over the past four or five.

“It’s coming up more and more,” Ms Dooley told The Age.

“Having proper sustainable options like the coffins … is probably the thing that people see the most as opposed to solar panels on the roof (of the funeral home).”

Ms Dooley, who directed Carolyn’s funeral, said the finished product was surprisingly soft.

“Almost the way I describe it is kind of like a marshmallow, but I don’t know that that does it justice. It looks beautiful, and it feels wonderful, and it’s incredibly environmentally sustainable.”

The mushroom coffin joins a growing list of attempts to make death a little greener.

Human composting, which transforms human remains into soil, is another option gaining international attention, with advocates pushing for NSW to become the first Australian state to legalise the practice.

For now, cremation remains considerably more popular than burial in Australia, at a ratio of about seven to three. Cost is a major factor, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne where cemetery land comes at a premium, but cremation itself carries an environmental price, releasing about 160 kilograms of carbon dioxide.

Traditional coffins also require materials such as timber that ultimately break down underground and can contribute pollutants to the surrounding soil.

The mushroom alternative can be used for both burials and cremations.

Mr Hendrikx, 32, stumbled across the idea while at university, experimenting with what could be made using mushrooms before deciding there might be a greener way to approach one of life’s few certainties.

Five years of development later, the idea has grown into a business — quite literally.

Australian interest was there from the beginning, but getting a mushroom-grown coffin into the country meant first navigating the nation’s notoriously tough biosecurity rules.

That hurdle has now been cleared, with Arrow Bronze signed as the Australian distributor of the Loop Living Cocoon and other mushroom-grown products, including urns.

And after Carolyn’s history-making farewell in the Blue Mountains, Australia’s funeral industry may have just found an unlikely new ingredient for going green.