The area where green burials will be offered in Royal View Memorial Cemetery. (Lethbridge News Now)

By David Opinko

Green Burials

Lethbridge is Alberta’s first municipality to offer “green burials”

Feb 14, 2020 | 9:58 AM

LETHBRIDGE, AB – The area might not look too green right now, but the City of Lethbridge hopes a section of the Royal View Memorial Cemetery will offer a more eco-friendly method of burial.

As the city’s Cemetery Services Manager Hiroshi Okubo explains, there is no embalming and no casket. The body would decompose over time and return back to the earth.

“For many, this concept combines the spiritual integrity of the past, with the environmental ideals of the present,” reads a media release from the City of Lethbridge.

The Grasslands Green Burial Grounds (GGBG) is specifically developed to use the natural landscape of the prairies.

While there is one green burial site in Edmonton, it is privately owned. That makes the one in Lethbridge the first in the province to be owned and operated by a municipality.

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It came to be following the city’s 2011 cemetery master plan.

The GGBG is located near the entrance to Pavan Park and will include more than 1,400 burial plots initially.

It will cost around the same amount of money to buy a certain burial plot as it would for a traditional burial, but the lack of embalming or a casket will drive down the cost.

Okubo says, while they are able to do green burials right now, there is still a bit of work to do over the next couple of months.

“We’ll be planting trees along the perimeter…Eventually, when the cemetery develops, there will be roadways to it, but temporarily, we’ll be building a gravel road access but it’ll be mostly for funeral homes so that they can get when they have an internment or a funeral that they can get the body to the burial site more than for most visitors it’ll be walk-in access.”

This work should be completed by the late spring.

For more details on green burials in Lethbridge, visit the city’s website here.