Why choose a green burial?
There is a strategic problem of overcrowding in most cemeteries and churchyards that is inescapable. Even the Church is now buying up land for green burial.
Coffins that are constructed with fake veneers, MDF, fibreglass, Styrofoam, harmful glues, metals, and other unnatural materials that damage the earth when the toxins are released into the soil and watercourse. The standard practise of burying MDF coffins covered in a thin veneer pollutes the ground potentially for 200 years or more. When unbiodegradable liners, fittings and coffins are burnt in crematoria they contribute to the lethal cancer causing dioxins, making up an estimated figure of 12% of all dioxins in the UK with well over 400,000 wooden coffins being burnt each year in the UK alone.
Unnatural materials not only damage the environment, they are not sustainably made or sourced and do not allow the body to breathe or to decompose at a natural rate. Naturally made organic coffins do not cost the earth in terms of sourcing the crop, their burial or cremation.
Not just those who are environmentally minded but those who want to mark their life and death in a new and vibrant way are investing in a “green” burials and or monuments.
Proof of the way people are changing is that the handful of green burial sites that existed in 1984 has grown to well over 150. Many of these are owned and managed by The Association of Nature Reserve Burial Grounds which aims to unite farmers and local authorities in producing wildlife habitats and forests from green burial sites. These sites are quickly becoming a valuable resource and conservation oasis in their own right, being sites where native species of trees and wild flowers are planted and rare animals are being re-introduced to thrive undisturbed.
As a result meadow brown butterfly colonies, grasshoppers, insects, bats, voles and owls are multiplying where they are free from the dangers of the mechanical mower and farm machinery. Green burial sites are evolving into important self supporting eco systems which accords with current government thinking in a number of documents planned to safeguard our green spaces and future.
Burials in a woodland setting are far closer to the surface of the earth than traditional burials which means that there is less opportunity for the mechanical removal of body tissue into the water course. Also, with a tree canopy over the grave in a green burial site, this is less likely to happen.
Golden Charter Funerals and other companies in line with this green ethos have planted over a million native trees with The Woodland Trust. This is without the estimated figures planted in conjunction with green burials. Quite apart from leaving something positive for the environment rather than a negative there are few who wouldn’t prefer to lie beneath a beautiful natural forest canopy than in a cold anonymous graveyard. Also synonymous with a “green burial” are those growing number of people who want something more personal, more pertinent to their life and ethos than a cold faceless end not representative to their individual life or beliefs.
