LANGLEY, WHIDBEY ISLAND—
We've all heard of "going green" to help protect the environment.There are green cars, green homes even green jobs.
Now at the City cemetery in Langley on Whidbey Island you can really go green and make it the last thing you do.
Jim Tully Wants to be environmentally conscious even in death. He says, "We're running out of space in the world and then it seems silly to waste these gigantic spaces with gigantic coffins and they're all putting waste material into the soil."
Tully didn't know how to do it until his wife Tiny read an article about the Langley Woodmen Cemetery.
Mrs. Tully says, "As soon as we saw that yesterday morning I said to Jim There's your answer... he's been looking for somewhere to go."
For more and more people, going green when they go is well, the only way to go.
Langley City Clerk Debbie Mahler says, "They don't want to be polluting the earth and filling it up. They want to just decompose in the natural way."
So exactly what is a green burial? Mahler says, "People are not embalmed. They have biodegradable caskets. They have to be made of wood without nails or there are paper mache caskets, bamboo, all kinds of materials that are biodegradable. They even have biodegradable urns."
Green burials are not all that common but maybe they would be if more people knew how much stuff we bury with our loved ones and what it could do to the environment."
Consider this each year, along with our dead, Americans bury
* 827,000 gallons of embalming fluid. That's enough to fill an Olympic size swimming pool.
* 2 million lbs. of steel, enough to rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge.
* 3.2 billion lbs. of reinforced concrete, enough for a two lane highway from San Francisco to Seattle
* 30 million board feet of wood, enough to build 244 houses.
Langley Woodmen only has 80 plots available and as they say, People are dying to get in.
The plots are available exclusively to Whidbey Island residents for six months at 1,000 dollars each.
Then if there are any left anyone can buy one for 1,200 dollars and there is a 400 dollar maintenance fee.
There are only 11 green cemeteries in the entire country.
