DIY Halloween special: Make your own eco-coffin with DIYing free

Halloween is here, along with customary graveyard processions. Instead of signing a funeral agreement, Makery shows you how to make your own cheap eco-coffin with the DIYing free project.

Dying is expensive. And hardly environmentally friendly. In order to reduce the cost of dying (as well as its carbon footprint), Canadian artist Justin Tyler Tate offers a green alternative to conventional burial modes with his DIYing free project. The idea is to use design and open source technologies to fabricate a low-cost coffin made from laser-cut recycled cardboard.

“The practice of selling coffins is not only costly to the buyer but also wastes a lot of materials (wood, fabric, foam) and the alternative, cremation, wastes a lot of energy,” Tate explains on his website, which details each step and instructions for assembling the DIY coffin. “Cardboard is the perfect material to make a coffin out of: it is often free because it’s a waste product, it is very strong in relation to its weight and it biodegrades quickly.”

Before cutting, you will need to gather the basic materials. Constructing the coffin requires 21 sheets of cardboard measuring 61 x 96 cm. Tate recommends going to bicycle shops and appliance and electronics stores—”good sources of free cardboard which is heavy-duty and comes in medium to large sheets”. You will also need several pieces of wood in varying sizes for the frame, and rope to lower the coffin into the grave.

Next, the site provides download links to drafts and laser-cutter files in various formats. The following video summarizes each step of the fabrication and assembly process. As a bonus, watch the friendly rehearsal of a DIY eco-burial.

DIYing free smartly links to the Fab Lab wiki to find the nearest laser-cutter. “We can’t stop from dying, but we can die smarter and more ecological, we can DIY,” is Tate’s catchy closing statement. We’ll see if the fablabs that assist these coffin-toting makers conclude that it’s all a good Halloween joke.

All about the DIYing free project

Download prototyping drafts for Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw