Welcome to our weekly newsletter where we highlight environmental trends and solutions that are moving us to a more sustainable world.

Hi, it's Anand. Our science and climate team comes alive while talking about death, and I loved the chance to explore a newish, greenish death practice — and what we leave behind on Earth.

This week:

Now you can be buried in a coffin made of fungi

The Big Picture: Corporate climate targets are stalling

Here's what happens when compostable products become litter

Now you can be buried in a coffin made of fungi

The natural burial area at Meadowvale Cemetery in Brampton, Ont., on September 15, 2025. (Anand Ram/CBC)

James Earl Jones, playing Mufasa in The Lion King, told me (and I reckon a few of us) that our bodies become the grass.

That's the voice I heard standing in front of the natural burial area of Meadowvale Cemetery in Brampton, Ont. — surrounded by the towering teasels and goldenrods, hearing the buzzing of bees and flies.

Because under all this wild growth, there are bodies. People whose burial here sends a message about how death can give life back to nature. People who either chose, or had the choice made for them by loved ones, to be buried here.

A short drive away, on display at the cemetery's main funeral centre, was a new offering for people who might consider that natural burial area.

A moss-lined Loop Living Cocoon on display at Meadowvale Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Centres in Brampton, Ont., on September 15, 2025. (Anand Ram/CBC)

"It's quite soft, it's almost like a blend of Styrofoam and cotton," described Angie Aquino, president of Canadian Memorial Services, as she showed me the Loop Living Cocoon.

It's a coffin, priced at $3,750, made of upcycled hemp fibres and mycelium, the root structure that fungi use and a material used in other sustainable-focused products . Why? Because in the soil, this coffin eventually biodegrades.

The appeal, says Aquino, is for a customer whose "value system in life is something that they want to maintain in death as well." For some, that might be about giving back to the earth and nourishing the soil.

Which is why clothing must be of natural fibres and there's no embalming, no jewelry, and no tokens of remembrance placed in the coffin allowed; people are given the option of the natural burial area to let their bodies decompose.

The Loop Living Cocoon sits in the centre of the funeral centre’s display room, with traditional coffins in the room behind it.