Eco-friendly, sustainable and DIY are not terms you would usually associate with the funeral business, but there are a growing number of families taking more active roles in funeral preparations.

Holistic Funeral Director Libby Moloney is the founder of the Natural Death Advocacy Network, an organisation advocating holistic approaches to dying and death.

Ms Moloney said the natural death movement was becoming more popular, partially as a response to the cost of conventional funeral care and also because of the environmental impact.

The ex-accountant and mother of three opened her own holistic funeral business in Woodend about three years ago.

Ms Moloney's decision was also borne from personal experience, after losing her husband of five years.

He died in hospital after being diagnosed with cancer 10 days beforehand.

"I then woke up ten years later and thought, 'what if we'd been able to do that, or if I'd been able to keep him at home? Would that have been different?'" she said.

Ms Moloney said even though the staff were gentle and kind, she only had two hours of contact with her husband after he died.

"That was all — nobody knew any different," she said.

To this day she does not know if his body was embalmed.

The practice of embalming

The modern method of embalming involves draining bodily fluids and replacing them with the chemical preservative formaldehyde.

It is used to preserve the body for public viewing.

"What it really does is prevent the drying out process," said Nigel Davies, Victorian Director of the National Funeral Directors Association and managing director of one of Melbourne's oldest and independently owned funeral services.

He said, given the right circumstances, the process of embalming could preserve a body for many years.

"We have actually exhumed a body 30 years later," he said.

"[It] had a light covering of blue mould, we could just wipe that off and the body didn't look too bad actually."

He said only about 10 per cent of bodies needed to be embalmed, and under Victorian law only when a body was repatriated interstate or oversees or if a body was placed in an above-ground mausoleum shelf, did it need to be embalmed.

"But there are still some companies that, as a matter of old-fashioned prestige, embalm every body that comes through," Mr Davies said.

"They still have it in their DNA, that that's the way to handle things."

Forgoing the formaldehyde

Ms Moloney, who refers to herself as a holistic mortician, said her funeral parlour in Woodend was chemical-free.

"In our experience of dealing with hundreds of families now, we've never had a request for embalming," she said.

Ms Moloney said they cared for the body the same way it was cared for before death — using warm water for a gentle body wash.

"There's no need for it to be a complicated process, it's easy to wash someone's hair and just dress them in the clothes that the families have asked for, or to shroud the naked form," she said.

She said the body was then anointed using essential oils of gold, frankincense and myrrh, and was preserved by a portable cooler keeping it below 5 degrees Celcius.

"That keeps it fine — you have no odour and no rapid change," said Ms Moloney.

"It's not a complicated thing."

Bringing death back into the home

Jacqui Morgan said has been interested in death for a long time and works as holistic mortician at Natural Grace in Woodend, which she also part owns. She is seated in the living room at work with two shrouds. ( ABC Central Victoria Larissa Romensky )

Ms Moloney said that natural death care followed the practices of traditional death care carried out in the home before the practice of outsourcing to funeral parlours became popular.

"Traditional death care belongs in the home where we as families and communities know how to look after our own dead," she said.

Part of the traditional practice she said was keeping vigil usually over a three-day period allowing the family to "slowly adjust to the death".

She said most of their clients opted for a mixture of care and they worked with them to support their choices, whether that be home-based care, natural care at the funeral parlour, or family-directed funerals.

The most popular request Ms Moloney said was for home-based care, particularly in the case of children and babies.

"They want the support to be in charge of their own and to care for their own," she said.

Funeral director Nigel Davies agrees.

"In some ways it's a return to basics ... it's a return to what we were doing centuries ago," he said.

# no coffins

Bill Taylor, chairman of the trustees at the Carlsruhe Cemetery in Central Victoria. He is standing in front of the natural burial site of John Morieson who was buried in a shroud with a stone and tree to mark his place. ( ABC Central Victoria Larissa Romensky )

The other popular choice according to Ms Moloney was the shrouded cremation.

This is where a body is covered in a specially constructed, weight-baring shroud made of natural fibres, rather than being placed in a coffin.

After researching the legislation in Victoria, Ms Moloney approached the Central Victoria Crematorium in Eaglehawk who took the idea on and became the first place in Victoria to introduce the practice.

"We started to introduce that in the middle of last year ... and that's since extended across a number of funeral directors," chief executive officer at Remembrance Park in Eaglehawk Graham Fountain said.

"Hashtag no coffin," Ms Moloney said, laughing.

If people do prefer a coffin Ms Moloney said there was a range of options made in a number of materials, from cardboard to sustainably sourced wood, and even a felted woollen coffin from England, popular for elderly women.

While people are generally unable to be buried on private land in Victoria, unless they make an application to the secretary of the Health Department, one central Victorian cemetery has introduced a natural burial site.

The Carlsruhe cemetery was the first cemetery in Victoria to introduce a natural burial ground in their eight-hectare site, after being approached by Ms Moloney about the idea.

"A natural burial sort of has the least amount of influence on the environment as possible," Carlsruhe cemetery chairman of trustees Bill Taylor said.

People are buried about one metre into the ground, often without a plaque and tree planted instead.

At this stage there are only two people buried in this section, with more than 2,000 spaces still available.