West Laurel Hill Cemetery Leads the Country in Green Burial Practices

Business for Good: A Greener Afterlife

The West Laurel Hill Cemetery and Funeral Home has the greenest burying practices in the state. At present you lot can intendance for the world even later you get out information technology.

Sep. eleven, 2019

Visit West Laurel Hill Cemetery on a Midweek afternoon and you lot'll find the usual memorable sights nosotros've come up to expect from one of the Philadelphia area's well-nigh magnificent historic graveyards: grand mausoleums; beautiful and weird sculptures marking moments in time; tree-lined lanes winding amid notable graves for anybody from Mother's Twenty-four hour period founder Anna Jarvis to David Garroway, the first anchor of NBC's Today Evidence.

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Merely show up at the correct fourth dimension and you also might find yourself face to face up with…goats? Goats. Running through the grass, snacking on leaves and dandelions, doing what goats do. And they're non at that place by accident, either. Led on leashes by handlers, the 10 or and then goats are natural backyard mowers working at West Laurel Hill'southward groundbreaking green burial site, Nature'southward Sanctuary.

Stretching two-thirds of an acre, Nature's Sanctuary abandons manicured lawns in favor of allowing wildflowers and grasses to grow over the graves. Instead of tombstones, there is a single wall overlooking the trail where the names of the people buried there are inscribed. The landscape is designed to evolve naturally, from a meadow filled with regional flowers to a forest filled with native plants. The goats keep the invasive species at bay without releasing natural gas into the temper.

Replacing traditional lawn mowers with goats is just 1 of 50 sustainability initiatives launched at Westward Laurel Hill since 2016, ranging from updating low-cal fixtures to utilise LED bulbs, to creating rain gardens and tree management plans, to keeping bee apiaries on the grounds to assistance go along the area pollinated—all part of the efforts that take made the Bala Cynwyd cemetery the near eco-witting in the country.

"The role of cemeteries is rapidly irresolute equally demographics and preferences virtually burial change," Goldernberg says.

"Nature'due south Sanctuary is our nearly successful sit-in of sustainability to date," says President and CEO Nancy Goldenberg. "No mechanism is used on this site, which means less energy and cleaner air. Economically, we are fulfilling a growing and valuable need of our customers, while enhancing our reputation. And we are creating resiliency to swings in trends and market forces."

Information technology might seem that graveyards are inherently light-green—they are, after all, green places with grass, flowers and copse. In truth, the burying industry is bad for the earth in many means: More than than 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde, a key chemical in embalming, enter the world each yr due to human burying practices. And formaldehyde isn't the only chemical entering our earth as a result of human being burial. Phenol, methanol, and glycerin are all involved in the embalming process and the chemicals used to go on cemetery lawns green and pristine also pollute the environment when they seep into the soil, contaminating the water supply, and killing native species.

Westward Laurel Hill contributed to this problem until 2008, when a board member, Cliff David, urged the cemetery and funeral dwelling house to alter course. David's full time job was serving as president of the Heritage Conservancy, a regional state-based trust in Doylestown that is dedicated to preserving the environment. He wanted to bring those values to West Laurel Hill.

Co-ordinate to Goldenberg, David introduced to West Laurel Hill the at present increasingly common thought of a "triple lesser line," in which people, planet and profit are treated equally. This launched the decade-long endeavor that led, eventually, to Goldenberg being hired in 2018, the same year Nature's Sanctuary won a SITES Gold Medal for mural sustainability. (SITES awards, which are awarded by the American Society of Landscape Architects and the Light-green Business Certification, recognize landscapes for their sustainable practices.)

A Penn-trained city planner, Goldenberg has spent her career beautifying Philadelphia's public spaces, from stints at the Center Metropolis District, the architecture firm Venturi Scott Dark-brown, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Gild and others. She has long championed the outdoors equally a means to engage Philadelphians—from bringing Outward Bound to Philly under Mayor Michael Nutter to serving equally chair of the Committee on Parks & Recreation, to helping launch the renovation of Dilworth Plaza.

Goldenberg never expected her career trajectory would land her in a cemetery, of all places. But in West Laurel Hill, she establish a blend of her passions for history, art, landscape design, nature, recreation and helping people. "The role of cemeteries is quickly changing every bit demographics and preferences about burial change," Goldenberg says. "The more I read and learned about the manufacture, the more fascinated I became. This position affords me the chance to innovate and implement innovative ideas and assist others to view cemeteries as much more than burial grounds."

In the last twelvemonth, West Laurel Loma has expanded its sustainability efforts to include a pet cemetery, congenital from stones recycled from their other cemeteries. The pets are buried in urns made from recycled lumber. They're cremated using a water-based process called aquamation that releases zero greenhouse gases and has only x percent of the carbon footprint that flame creation does.

While aquamation hasn't been approved for use on people in Pennsylvania, in 2010 W Laurel Loma updated its human crematorium to be more than environmentally friendly. This upgrade has decreased visible emissions from 80 percent to 10 per centum.

No caskets are required for burying in Nature's Sanctuary, which allows bodies to decompose naturally and give back to the environment. If people cull to bury their loved ones in a casket, information technology must be biodegradable. While most people who are cached in Nature's Sanctuary are not embalmed, West Laurel does offer an eco-friendly embalming selection that is certified past the Greenish Burial Council. The lack of a casket and embalming cuts down funeral costs for families as well, making dark-green burials cheaper than the traditional funerals and cremation. Since offering the option in 2008, West Laurel Hill has seen increased interest each year from consumers.

The sustainability initiatives at Nature's Sanctuary go paw in paw with West Laurel Hill'due south community out-attain initiatives, aimed at helping Philadelphians become more environmentally conscious. These efforts include promoting biking through the cemetery, partnering with scientists from the Academy of Natural Sciences and local birders for bird-watching tours, and a volunteer garden program they're piloting this year.

Information technology might seem that graveyards are inherently green. In truth, the burial industry is bad for the earth in many ways: More than 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde, a fundamental chemic in embalming, enter the earth each year due to human burying practices.

These activities let people to acquire virtually both the environment and the history of the cemetery, which is 1 of the oldest in the nation. At the weekly summer goat walks, for instance, a member of the Philly Caprine animal Project educates the group on the part the goats play in sustainability while an employee of West Laurel Hill shares stories from the cemetery's history.

Founded in 1869 as the sister cemetery to Laurel Hill on the other side of the Schuylkill River, Due west Laurel Hill was created afterward Quaker and librarian John Jay Smith brutal in love the rolling hills and strong trees that stretched over the land. Now that they have embraced sustainability, the cemetery is preserving the state that Smith fell in love with while besides educating today's citizens on how their bear upon on the environment lives on later death. "We had many families come to us, expressing interest in light-green burial, wanting to get role of the earth's perpetual legacy," Goldenberg says.

She saw this firsthand on her first day at West Laurel Hill, when a friend called to tell her that she knew someone who had recently passed and was being buried in Nature's Sanctuary. She told Goldenberg that the husband of the woman who had died wanted to celebrate her love of gardening. Goldenberg knew just how Nature's Sanctuary could help them accomplish that.

"With him and his family, we developed a plan for her garden club colleagues to come to West Laurel Hill in the spring and plant some of our empty urns and cradle graves, followed by a luncheon to commemorate her life," she says. "Nearly 100 gardeners showed up with trowels in hand and helped adorn our cemetery while remembering a friend. It was truly a manner to celebrate the life of a wonderful woman, connecting to what she truly loved—gardening."

Photo courtesy Viktor Hanacek / picjumbo

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/west-laurel-hill-cemetery-green-burial/

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