Winnipeg’s Brookside Cemetery offering green burials

A city-run cemetery is offering a new option to consider when making final burial arrangements. CTV’s Daniel Halmarson explains.

There are more than 110,000 burials at Winnipeg’s Brookside Cemetery, and the city is offering people a new way to be laid to rest here.

A half-acre of land, swathed in native grass and wildflowers, nestled along Omand’s Creek is now home to a natural burial site.

“It’s really enclosed by beautiful, 100-year-old mature trees,” Brett Shenback, the City of Winnipeg’s cemeteries administrator, told CTV News. “So it’s a really peaceful and tranquil space.”

Brookside is the first cemetery in Manitoba certified by the Green Burial Society of Canada.

“With green burial, people are buried a little bit closer to the surface where the ground is more biologically active,” Trishia Penner, a Green Burial Society of Canada board member, said. “And then their body in the ground can actually be a gift – something that benefits the earth rather than something that is a strain on it.”

Brett Shenback said there’s been a growing demand for options to minimize environmental footprints after death – and said Brookside Cemetery has already sold several plots in the natural burial site since announcing it publicly on Tuesday.

“People are just really looking to have more of a minimal impact on the environment and returning their body back to the earth in a fairly natural state, or as natural as possible,” Shenback said.

He said natural burial follows a few fundamentals, including ecological restoration and conservation.

“Embalming is not permitted on the site, so bodies are interred within the area, not embalmed,” he explained. “Additionally, bodies are interred in a shroud or biodegradable casket.”

He said flat markers and upright monuments are also not permitted on the site. Instead, people can honour loved ones at a communal memorial.

Shenback added there’s enough space for 130 full-body interments at Brookside’s natural burial site with room to expand in the future.

“We’re really looking to just sort of learn from this experience and see what kind of response we get from the community.”

Trishia Penner from the Green Burial Society of Canada commended the City of Winnipeg for establishing the site, and said she’s working on plans to create a green cemetery near Tyndall, Man.

“It’s about giving people choices,” Penner said.

Natural burial plans can be arranged directly through Brookside Cemetery.

More information can be found on the City of Winnipeg’s website.