Once I spotted it, I couldn’t unsee it. Walking my dog through a 70-acre Dublin cemetery last week all I could notice was plastic, everywhere. Plastic on the graves, shaped and coloured to resemble flowers. Wedges of plastic foam tumbling in the wind. Empty plastic plant pots lying abandoned under trees and lodged in the base of hedgerows. Christmas wreaths and casket sprays full of loving intentions – otherwise beautiful, if they weren’t so toxic to life.
These plastics are made from oil and don’t break down. They persist for centuries, fragmenting into microplastics that contaminate water and soil and enter the food chain. Seabirds will mistake them for food and eat them, causing damage to their digestive systems and leading to starvation or death. Turtles, dolphins and whales will become entangled in the stuff. Instead of graveyards being beautiful spaces of memory and life, we’ve allowed plastic – a deadly material that refuses to become earth – to take a firm hold.
Crematoriums in the UK send 14,670 cubic metres of floral foam and single-use plastic to landfill every year – that’s six Olympic-sized swimming pools, jammed with plastic, sent to the dump. The scale of the issue in Ireland is hard to gauge because there appears to be no data, but given about 30,000 people are buried in Irish graveyards and cemeteries each year, that’s potentially 30,000 graves adorned with something that will outlast use for multiple generations, while damaging the environment along the way.
It’s all so understandable. A few years ago, when someone close to me died, microplastics and turtles were the last thing on my mind. Grief makes us all do things we ordinarily might try to avoid. All you want is a beautiful tribute that will last longer than a few days – something that will be there when you visit in a few months or years, when flowers have long since gone to earth. Plastic endures. The funeral industry understands this. Floral foam is lightweight and cheap, allowing florists to create perfect arrangements, held in plastic trays, secured with plastic tape and adorned with colourful plastic bows and ribbons. Plastic flowers don’t ask anything of us at all, not even water.
But we’re all paying for it. Our local county councils are responsible for most burial grounds and they use public money to pay staff to collect the plastic, and landfill operators to dispose of the stuff – tens of thousands of euro spent each year just to throw plastic away. Yet they also have waste management plans which must also include targets for reuse and repair, and legally binding commitments to the circular economy and waste prevention. Bylaws governing burial grounds might be an immediate way where they can shift away from plastic.
In 2019, in an effort to try something different and reduce landfill costs, Wigan Council in the UK partnered with a local business to repurpose plastic floral tributes. After grieving families display them for a week, the plastic frames were stripped, restored with silk flowers and resold at reduced prices, which makes them more affordable for families to buy.
Floral foam that finds its way to the landfill doesn’t just sit there. It crumbles and fragments into tiny pieces. If you stick real flowers into the foam, when you try to separate them for composting, the stems become contaminated with plastic. A 2019 study by Australian researchers found that the foam is ingested by freshwater and marine animals, affecting their health, and that microplastics leach chemicals into the surrounding water. Floral foam leachate is more toxic to aquatic insects than from other types of plastic.
Can we find a more nature-first way to rid our burial grounds of plastic? Irish funeral directors need to start offering plastic-free alternatives as the default. Cemetery operators and local councils could partner at scale with producers, like Flower Farmers of Ireland, a network of commercial growers selling locally grown seasonal flowers, and make those the affordable option. It would support Irish businesses, reduce plastic imports and slash landfill costs simultaneously.
Could our burial grounds become memorial places where the soil is nourished, the insects are fed, the birds are thriving, and our late loved ones are remembered not with the deadly permanence of plastic, but with plants and trees that will, like all of us, eventually return to the earth? Ivy symbolises memory and eternal life, while white clover traditionally symbolises hope and healing. Both of them feed the bees. Forget-me-nots scattered across a grave speak of undying love and loyalty – they’re also a food for hoverflies. Life begets life – where there are plenty of insects, the birds and bats will soon follow.
Our burial grounds could be repositories of life; exquisite, nature-filled spaces in the middle of our cities and towns. Places where the soil is nourished, insects thrive, birds sing, the seasons are marked, and people gather to mourn, contemplate, sit, walk, remember and cry, not away from nature, but held within it. Dust to dust, earth to earth – it isn’t an end, but a constant return.
