What is a green funeral?
A green funeral is where the one of the main considerations for the funeral is to lessen it’s environmental impact.
For a long time, a green funeral was considered a separate type of funeral, however, we believe that it is important to make sure that elements of a funeral are more environmentally friendly by default. This means that it is easier than ever to have a funeral that has a positive environmental impact.
Why Rosedale?
Rosedale was advocating environmentally ‘green’ funerals and ways of working long before it became popular to do so and, as a result, we have won several awards including
- Being recognised as one of Suffolk’s 100 greenest businesses
- The EDP Environment and Sustainability Award in 2018
- Greener Globes Platinum Award (office in Diss, Norfolk)
- Good Funeral Awards Greenest Funeral Director
We don’t want to fall into the category of ‘greenwashing’, which is the process of conveying a false impression or giving misleading information about how our products, values and integrity are environmentally sound.
If we say we do it, we do it.
What needs to be considered for a environmentally friendly funeral?
Burial or Cremation
Burial is considered more environmentally friendly than cremation, especially if in a designated woodland burial park.
If cremation is preferred, then we can work out the carbon that has been used in order to off-set it. We can also advise on environmentally friendly caskets for the ashes afterwards.
Coffin choice
All our coffins have always had green credentials, whether this be by being FSC certified or by offering alternatives such as woollen or willow coffins. These have often been more expensive than more ‘traditional’ coffins, so we were pleased to be able to introduce a ‘LifeArt’ range of coffins that uses environmentally friendly enviroboard which not only produce up to 87% less carbon emissions, can be offered at a competitive price, making a green choice both accessible and affordable.
Transport
We are actively searching for more environmentally friendly hearses and limousines, but unfortunately there are no options that meet our needs at present. In this respect, we would work out the carbon used for the funeral in order to off-set it
Alternatively, we have access to a bicycle hearse if the funeral location is local and practical for its use. We would also advise encouraging people to car share where possible and to take the most direct route to the funeral venue.
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Flowers
We have worked closely with florists to reduce the plastic content as far as reasonably possible in funeral flowers. We also have silk floral tributes that we can loan for the funeral so that flowers do not need to be purchased.
Pictured is Gabi from Gabriel’s Garden who specialises in environmentally friendly and natural floral arrangements.
Service Sheets
The ideal choice would be to not have service sheets and use hymnbooks or projected lyrics for words. However, we acknowledge that these are often important keepsakes.
The printers we choose to work with are environmentally conscious. Their paper is carbon offset as they are part of the Woodland Trust Carbon Offset Scheme. Their Presses have parts that are designed to be recycled with sustainable ink developed from recycled materials and they run with virtually zero emissions. You can also choose to have your service sheets printed on recycled paper adding another green element to the choice.
Donations
You may wish to encourage people to leave donations instead of flowers.
We can set up donations so that the are entirely processed online. This reduces the paper involved in the process, as well as it being a convenient way for people to leave money in memory of their loved one.
Carbon Off-setting
In the first instance it is always better to try to make choices that minimise the carbon used on a funeral, for example, by encouraging people to walk to the funeral venue (where possible).
When these choices have been exhausted, we use Carbon Footprint Ltd as our preferred online tool to work out the carbon used, we can then use this figure to determine how much needs to be off-set.
