What is a green burial?
A burial that puts the body straight into the earth without embalming, without a metal or hardwood casket, and without a concrete vault. The Green Burial Council, which certifies providers in the United States, describes a conventional burial as exactly those three things and green burial as the return to what came before them: the body in a biodegradable container, or a shroud, or nothing more than a pouch. It certifies three kinds of cemetery, hybrid, natural and conservation, and the requirements get stricter at each step. This page carries no prices, and that is a decision rather than a gap. Burial grounds do publish them; the four this site checked all publish them with no effective date at all, and an undated figure is one this site will not put beside a dated one as though they were the same kind of thing.
The 3 kinds of certified cemetery ordered by how much each obliges the ground to do. A longer bar is a stricter level; the length shows the order and measures nothing else.
What a green burial leaves out
The Green Burial Council defines it against the conventional burial rather than on its own, and three things are absent.
- Embalming. The body is not chemically preserved, which is also why timing matters more than it does with a conventional burial.
- A metal or hardwood casket. The container has to be biodegradable: a casket of untreated wood, a shroud, a pouch, or a biodegradable urn for ashes.
- A concrete vault or grave liner. This is the item most conventional cemeteries require and a green burial ground does not.
- Non-native markers. Certified natural and conservation grounds limit or prohibit them, and some use GPS, native stone or mapping to record where a grave is instead.
The three kinds of certified cemetery
The Green Burial Council certifies cemeteries at three levels, and the level tells you what the ground is obliged to do rather than what it charges.
| Level | What it requires |
|---|---|
| Hybrid | Created inside an existing conventional cemetery. The fewest requirements of the three, and usually a section of a larger burial ground rather than a site of its own. |
| Natural | Everything a hybrid requires, plus prohibiting toxic chemicals, non-organic caskets, vaults and non-native markers. The land must be designated for the natural cemetery only, and the ground must establish funds for long-term maintenance. |
| Conservation | Everything a natural cemetery requires, plus an Ecological Impact Assessment, restricted access to ecologically sensitive areas, no long-term degradation of the land from burial practices, markers limited by ecological impact, and established conservation, preservation and restoration practices sensitive to the history of the land. Burial fees fund the conservation of the land itself. |
What to ask a burial ground
Because the price lists are not comparable in the way a funeral home’s are, the questions do more work here than the numbers.
- Which certification level the ground holds, if any. Hybrid, natural and conservation are different obligations, and an uncertified ground may still be green in practice but is promising it to nobody.
- What the plot price includes and what is charged on the day. Every ground checked prices opening and closing the grave separately from the plot, and several charge more at a weekend than on a weekday.
- Whether a vault is required. The Federal Trade Commission states that no state law requires an outer burial container anywhere in the United States, and a green burial ground will not require one, but a conventional cemetery usually does.
- Whether a funeral home has to be involved at all, and if so which charges are the home’s and which are the ground’s. These arrive as two bills and only one of them is governed by the Funeral Rule.
- When the price list was last changed. None of the four checked said, so the answer has to come from asking.
Why a burial ground can publish prices without dating them
This is the part that explains the shape of this page, and it is a rule rather than an accident. The Federal Trade Commission states that the Funeral Rule does not apply to cemeteries that lack an on-site funeral home. A conservation burial ground is a cemetery. So the obligations that make a funeral home’s General Price List quotable here, an itemised list, handed over, carrying an effective date, do not reach it. The four grounds this site checked all publish prices and none of them publishes a date, which is lawful and is exactly why those figures are not printed on this page beside dated ones. The same gap explains why the pet guides on this site could quote boarding and grooming, where providers post rate cards, and not pet dentistry or pet cremation, where no rule obliges anyone to post anything.
Questions
What is a green burial?
A burial that places the body directly in the earth in biodegradable materials, without embalming, without a metal or hardwood casket and without a concrete vault. The Green Burial Council describes it as a return to how people buried their dead before those three things became usual.
What can the body be buried in?
Anything fully biodegradable. The Green Burial Council names a casket, a shroud, an urn or a pouch made of 100% biodegradable materials, and the point of the requirement is that the container supports a return to the earth rather than resisting it.
What are the three kinds of green cemetery?
Hybrid, natural and conservation, certified by the Green Burial Council in that order of strictness. A hybrid sits inside an existing conventional cemetery. A natural cemetery adds bans on toxic chemicals, non-organic caskets, vaults and non-native markers, and must fund its own long-term maintenance. A conservation cemetery adds an Ecological Impact Assessment and ties the burial fees to conserving the land.
Do I need a vault for a green burial?
No, and a green burial ground will not want one. The Federal Trade Commission states that outer burial containers are not required by state law anywhere in the United States; where they are required it is the cemetery requiring them, and a green cemetery does the opposite.
Why does this page not give me prices?
Because the ones available cannot be dated. Green burial grounds do publish prices, and all four checked for this page publish them with no effective date. This site prints a figure only with the date its source put on it, so these are described rather than quoted.
Why do funeral homes date their price lists and cemeteries not?
Because the Funeral Rule reaches one and not the other. The Federal Trade Commission states that the Rule does not apply to cemeteries that lack an on-site funeral home, so a burial ground has no obligation to itemise its prices, hand them over or date them, while a funeral home does.
Where these figures come from
This page describes a practice and cites the body that certifies it, and it publishes no prices at all. The Green Burial Council material was read on 23 September 2026 from a page last updated on 15 April 2026, and the Funeral Rule statements come from the Federal Trade Commission page dated July 2012, read again on 9 October 2026, whose rule text on the eCFR, up to date as of 7 October 2026, is unchanged since 1994. Both are linked below. Four conservation and natural burial grounds were checked for usable price lists while this page was researched, and all four publish prices without an effective date, which is lawful for a cemetery without an on-site funeral home and is the reason no figures from them appear here. Certification levels describe what a ground has agreed to do, not what it charges, and an uncertified ground may still bury greenly without having promised anyone that it will.