Are you interested in Green Burials? Your Cemetery Trustees would like your opinion.

Here in Andover, deceased family members are either cremated and buried in an urn, or they are embalmed and buried in a casket within a vault. A number of residents have asked about being able to have a green burial space as an alternative. 

A “green burial” is defined as a way of caring for the dead with minimal environmental impact.  Bodies are buried without embalming, casket liners, or vaults, and biodegradable containers or shrouds are used. This is the way our ancestors were buried hundreds of years ago. What was old and out-of-date comes ‘round again!

Interest was further piqued in March when Lee Webster spoke at The Andover Community Hub  to an audience of around 50 people. Lee is an internationally recognized writer, educator, and public speaker on funeral reform. She is an advocate for green burials.  

Your Cemetery Trustees and a member of The Andover Conservation Committee met with Lee in June to walk through Proctor Cemetery and discuss the pros and cons of green burials, and to determine if it is an option for Andover. We would like to find out exactly how much interest there is in Andover. This will help us know how to move forward and to understand if the time spent developing a plan and creating a space is worthwhile.  

The New Hampshire Funeral Resources, Education & Advocacy has produced a survey and will tally Andover responses for us and then share the results. But we need you, the town residents, to participate in this survey. The more people who take the survey, the better the results. 

The website is www.nhfuneral.org/survey-910606.html. We will have a copy of the survey itself and some brochures at a table on Election Day at the school for you to look through. But we DO need you to go online and fill out the survey.  

Entering your zip code will allow them to correlate the results to Andover. We ask for the results at the end of December. We appreciate your help.

Other sources on green burial include:
nhfuneral.org/green_burial_new_hampshire
nhmagazine.com/green-burials/

You will find many sources just by googling “green burials in New Hampshire.”