In this open access article with the Journal of Material Culture, I think through the temporal and moral qualities that may be attributed to synthetic materials. Based on fieldwork in Ghana, I draw out how locally specific views on materials are important to understand in the context of global systemic phenomena such as colonial history and capitalism. The ethnography is based on studying death-related practices such as commemoration, funerals and undertaking in a Ghanaian town, sketching similarities and differences in ways of preserving and discarding humans and synthetics.