What are presentable, environmentally friendly, burn faster than cardboard, and are currently being offered to the family’s of the deceased? “Eco-coffins.” Many say they may just be the solution to long wait-lists at busy crematoriums.
The new creation is taking off in Hong Kong where health officials there want to introduce the green coffins– made of corrugated cardboard and said to speed up the cremation process from two and a half hours to an hour–to alleviate traffic at crematoriums.
Speaking to news reporters Hong Kong government officials said: “With less time required for each session, we can arrange more sessions per day to cut queuing time for cremation. That in turn will help ease the demand on our public mortuary.”
When I first heard about eco-coffins, I thought, oh, a coffin for nature lovers. I’ve written blogs about eco-lovers and eco-vacations, but eco-coffins? If you live (and die) in Hong Kong the idea makes perfect sense. Cremating the dead is more common and affordable than burials in land-scarce Hong Kong. Government officials there said Hong Kong has six crematoria which provides 34,400 cremation sessions a year — about 94 sessions every day — but families of the dead often have to wait more than 10 days until they are assigned a slot.
Ironically, while the new coffins are presentable, and certainly practical (they are said to produce less toxic gas during combustion), one concern government officials have is that the eco-coffins won’t be embraced by people in Hong Kong, where skimping on the traditional Chinese rituals of sending the dead away is seen as a sign of disrespect.
However, in places like Japan and Europe the eco-coffins are gaining in popularity. Some speculate that since the eco-coffin coincides with the Asian philosophy of “integration between man and nature,” it would be just a matter of time before the new coffins become more acceptable to the Chinese.
What do you think about the ec-coffin concept? Would you choose one?