Guelph Tribune
Woodlawn Memorial Park is looking at offering environmentally friendly green burials, a trend that cemetery general manager Paul Taylor says is “going around the world.”
The innovation could see burials in wood boxes in unmarked graves in a field covered with wild grasses, in a part of the cemetery lands that is currently undeveloped, he said. The grass wouldn’t be mowed, weeds would be hand-picked and graves would be dug by hand.
“With a green burial you’d be doing things by hand, trying to avoid use of fossil fuels,” Taylor said.
That’s the model of green burials now coming from Europe, although there are a number of possible variations and he’ll want to hear what the local community desires, he said.
Taylor was interviewed about his thoughts on green burials and how they might work at the Woodlawn cemetery for a CBC-TV special on the Canadian funeral industry called “Outside the Box.”
It will air on CBC Newsworld at 10 p.m. Wednesday June 22, with repeats at 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. June 23.
“Woodlawn has always tried to be as open-minded as possible, offering as many options as we can afford,” Taylor said in an interview Wednesday. “But our lead truly comes from the community we are serving.”
The cemetery has 30 acres of undeveloped land off Nicklin Road, and it plans to start selling 900 graves in a three-acre section this fall.
After that, planning will start on developing the rest of this land, and the option of green burials is expected to be part of that planning, he said.
Instead of headstones, there could be one central memorial listing the names of people given green burials, Taylor said. Visitors could look from there over the natural setting in which their loved ones are buried.
There is “quite an active” green burial movement now in British Columbia, he said. He expects it to come to Ontario, as trends in Canada usually move from west to east.
One of the things to be studied in Woodlawn’s undeveloped land is the type of soil there and the feasibility of digging graves by hand.
Although green burial areas are left natural, they can be more labour-intensive than traditional burial areas, because what maintenance occurs is done by hand, he said.