Designers from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands teamed up with a local natural history museum to develop the “Living Cocoon,” a moss-filled, “living” coffin made out of a special fungus.
The coffin significantly speeds up the time it takes for a human body — plus all the clothing and other materials that get buried along with it — to decompose, from roughly a decade to as little as two years, according to its inventors.
“The Living Cocoon enables people to become one with nature again and to enrich the soil, instead of polluting it,” Bob Hendrikx, founder of Loop, the startup that developed the coffin, said in a statement.