Bizarre But True! Your body contains around 219 toxic chemicals right now. Tobacco residue. Pesticides. Heavy metals like lead and mercury. Fungicides. Preservatives. The American Centre for Disease Control tracked them all and when you die, every single one of those toxins gets released into the soil during traditional burial…
That’s the problem Jae Rhim Lee decided to solve. But her method? Training mushrooms to eat her whilst she’s still alive!
The Woman Who Fed Mushrooms With Her Own Body
Lee didn’t just invent the Infinity Burial Suit. She bred a personalised fungus using her own hair, nails, skin cells, blood and various bodily excretions to create what she calls the “Infinity Mushroom.”~
The logic is brutal and brilliant: teach the mushroom to recognise your specific cells so it can consume you more efficiently after death.
The suit itself costs £1,200 and looks like what Lee described as “ninja pyjamas” – a full-body garment covered in netting laden with mushroom spores. When you’re buried in it, the fungi wake up and get to work breaking down your body whilst simultaneously filtering out those 219 toxic chemicals before they contaminate the groundwater.
Luke Perry, the Beverly Hills 90210 actor, requested one in his advance care directives before his death in 2019. That single celebrity endorsement dragged mushroom burial suits from fringe environmental movement into mainstream conversation.
Traditional Burial Is An Environmental Disaster
The funeral industry burns through resources at a staggering rate.
Every year in the US alone, traditional burials consume over 16 million litres of embalming fluid (including 3 million litres of formaldehyde), 20 million board feet of hardwood, 2,700 tonnes of copper and bronze, 100,000 tonnes of steel, and 1.6 million tonnes of reinforced concrete.
Traditional coffins take 10-20 years to decompose. Mushroom coffins reduce that to approximately three years.
Cremation isn’t any better either. It takes about 106 litres of fuel to incinerate a single human body at temperatures around 980°C for 3-4 hours. In 2013, US cremations consumed enough energy to drive to the moon and back 1,307 times!
Plus, cremation releases toxic gases and heavy metals, including mercury from dental amalgam fillings, straight into the atmosphere.
The Market Is Shifting Fast
As of November 2024, there are 470 green burial cemeteries in the United States and Canada. In 2005, there was one.
Cemeteries report a 72% increase in demand for green burials. The global green funerals market was valued at approximately £1.8 billion in 2024 and projections suggest it’ll hit £5.2 billion by 2034.
68% of Americans now factor environmental impact into funeral service decisions. That’s not a niche movement anymore. That’s a cultural recalibration of how people think about death. The shift makes sense when you look at what mushrooms can actually do.
Mushrooms That Eat Oil, Plastic And Even Explosives
The oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus) used in mycoremediation projects doesn’t just break down human tissue. It can decompose petroleum hydrocarbons, plastics and TNT!
In one experiment, oyster mushroom spores reduced toxic PAH concentration in diesel-contaminated soil from 10,000 parts per million to less than 200 ppm in just eight weeks – measurable soil detoxification happening faster than traditional decomposition could ever achieve.
Pet versions of the Infinity Burial Suit are available for £160, ranging from extra small (for hamsters and small fish) to large (for medium-large dogs). The fact that people are buying mushroom suits for their goldfish tells you how far this concept has travelled from its origins.
The Funeral Industry Isn’t Convinced
Jae Rhim Lee’s 2011 TED Talk has over 1.7 million views. But viral success doesn’t equal industry acceptance.
In 2020, a podcast episode featured “The Modern Mortician” discussing participation in a study that found the suit “ineffective.” Critics have called the claims “wildly misleading” and accused it of being “a solution to an invented problem.”
The funeral industry’s scepticism centres on whether the mushrooms actually accelerate decomposition significantly or if the suit is just expensive theatre that makes people feel better about an inevitable biological process. The data on decomposition rates exists, but the long-term studies on toxin filtration are still catching up to the marketing.
Green Burial Goes Mainstream
Mushroom suits are the most visually striking option, but they’re part of a broader green burial movement that includes biodegradable coffins, natural burial shrouds and cemetery plots that skip embalming entirely.
The goal is the same across all formats: minimise environmental impact and let the body return to the earth without chemical intervention or resource-heavy containers.
Whether the mushroom suit delivers on that promise at scale or remains a niche product for the environmentally anxious is still being determined. But the fact that the conversation is happening and that the market is responding, signals a shift in how people want to be remembered. Not as a toxin leak in a steel box. But as compost.
