Green Beyond the Grave
Kerry Banks, Financial Post Magazine
Royal Oak’s Stephen Olson: “The funeral industry can’t afford to ignore this trend”
If you go to pay your respects to someone buried at Royal Oak Burial Park’s green cemetery in Victoria, you won’t see any tombstones. In the park-like glade bordered by pines, you’ll locate the grave with a GPS device. The dead haven’t been buried in coffins, but instead were put into the ground - without being embalmed - in caskets made of biodegradable materials such as wicker, bamboo or even cardboard. Families can plant trees and wildflowers over the grave, and as the site fills up, it will gradually return to a forest.
Royal Oak is the first cemetery in Canada to respond to the interest in green burials. After a growing number of requests in the past few years, Royal Oak opened the new section in October. The 86-year-old not-for-profit started small, with 255 plots, but with dozens of people on the waiting list, executive director Stephen Olson is already considering expansion. “There has been a tremendous amount of interest,” he says. “I have been in the funeral business a long time and I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
The green burial movement began in Great Britain in the mid-1990s, when people began to express concerns about the pollution caused by cremations and embalming. The country now has more than 200 such burial sites, and the idea has spread to other parts of Europe and the U.S. Although Royal Oak is the first Canadian cemetery to adopt the format, Nicole Renwick of the Memorial Society of B.C., an organization that helps members plan their own funerals, predicts that others will follow. “We have 200,000 members and many of them are interested in green burials,” she says.
Although natural burials are inexpensive - a green burial at Royal Oak costs $3,400, in comparison with up to $5,000 for a standard internment - Olson says that the Canadian funeral industry, which has seen its profits steadily decline over the past 25 years, can’t afford to ignore the trend.