Barbara Glick has known for decades exactly how she wants to be laid to rest when she dies.

No embalming; no casket; no cremation. “Even when I was in my 20s, I had this idea that I wanted to just be buried naked, near a tree, and just decompose,” says Glick, a nurse consultant who lives in Greenbelt, Md.

The self-described nature-lover, vegan and bird-watcher, who is 60 and healthy, says she aims to do as little harm to the environment as possible. To that end, she has reserved a plot beside the wooded walking trail at New Jersey’s Steelmantown Cemetery, which bills itself as “perfect for those that want to become one with the Earth.”

Barbara Glick, 60, has plans for a “green burial” in a New Jersey cemetery. Robert Schroeder/MarketWatch

Welcome to the world of “green funerals.” Interest in environmentally friendly alternatives to traditional funeral and burial practices, services and products is booming, death-care industry groups and companies say, as aging Americans increasingly consider them.

“People don’t want the funeral they saw their grandmother or their parents had,” said Darren Crouch, president of Passages International, a green funeral products wholesaler in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “They’re looking for something completely different.”

As interest grows, more funeral homes offer green options

For reasons including savings and environmental benefits, interest in green funerals — broadly defined as those meant to have a decreased environmental impact, which might include biodegradable caskets and fewer chemicals — jumped to 64% of adults aged 40 or older in 2015 from 43% in 2010, according to an April Funeral and Memorial Information Council study.

While the number of green funerals or burials isn’t tracked, those in the field expect numbers to increase. More funeral homes now offer green options, according to the National Funeral Directors Association, which says that in 2011, about 12% of its members offered green funerals or burials. Earlier this year, that number was at 32%.

Joe Sehee of the Green Burial Council, a nonprofit organization that has established standards for funeral homes, cemeteries and funeral product makers, said his group had certified only one green funeral provider in North America in 2006. That number is now above 340, including 270 funeral homes and 60 cemeteries from California to Maine.

“It’s going to trend up as baby boomers go into the grave,” said Sehee. “This is a generation of people that has upended every cultural milestone they’ve met.”

Green burials can mean cost savings

Some green burial customers are like Glick, interested out of a love for Mother Earth. Others say they’re interested in saving money. In 2010, 15% of people over 40 surveyed by the Funeral and Memorial Information Council said they would be interested in a green funeral primarily for cost reasons. By 2015, that had risen to 26%.

Natural burials cost an average of $2,000 to $3,000 including a burial plot, interment fees and a shroud or environmentally friendly casket, according to Sehee.

A traditional funeral can cost much more. The median cost of a funeral with a metal casket, viewing and burial was $7,181 in 2014, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. Add a burial vault, which the NFDA says is typically required by cemeteries, and the cost jumps above $8,500.

Green funerals aren’t always the cheapest option, notes Sehee, who said they fall between cremation and traditional funerals on the cost scale. A recent study by the Funeral Consumers Alliance found direct cremation costs, including picking up a body, paperwork, and the cremation process itself, of as low as $495 in Seattle and as high as $7,595 in Washington, D.C. Executive Director Joshua Slocum said consumers should generally expect costs of between $700 and $1,200.

At Steelmantown Cemetery, proprietor and current Green Burial Council president Ed Bixby says plots range from $1,500 to $3,000 and “anything that’s biodegradable is acceptable” for burial — including naked bodies. Concrete vaults for caskets aren’t permitted, and burial sites are hand-dug.

Glick says she doesn’t see the point of a shroud — “It’s just something else that’s in the ground,” she said — but for those who do, companies like Passages offer biodegradable shrouds, caskets of bamboo and willow, Himalayan rock-salt urns, and recyclable tubes for scattering ashes after cremation.

A biodegradable urn made of Himalayan rock salt. Courtesy Passages International

Crouch, Passages’ president, says his company’s sales have grown between 15% and 30% a year recently and his latest catalog — which includes urns with recommended retail prices of between $75 and $375 — is, at 44 pages, its largest yet. (For more upmarket shoppers, San Francisco-based Kinkaraco sells an $1,100 silk shroud as part of its “Mort Couture” luxe collection, as well as a 100% cotton shroud for $299.)

Increased interest in green funerals extends to the services as well as the products, says Robert Prout, a funeral director at the Verona, N.J.-based funeral home that bears his family name — and gets most of its electricity from solar power. Families often ask to help bathe or shroud a body before a natural burial, he said, or to lower the casket into the gravesite.

It’s “the basic ‘unto earth you shall return’-type of concept that I think appeals to people” planning green funerals, said Prout.

Ultimately, Sehee says, the decision to arrange a green burial is usually made with more than cost in mind. Those who choose them, he says, often take pride in its unconventionality.

Customers “like knowing that their death can connect with life,” he says. “Being born and dying and decaying and being reborn — they want to get in sync with that. That’s what’s really at the core of this.”

That is largely how Glick, who calls herself “anti-corporate” and a “hippie type,” sees her own plans to be buried in New Jersey. Her plot, she says, is in “a very natural setting. I just can’t imagine being buried anywhere else.”