Green Cemetery Calculator

Green burial grounds intentionally keep a large share of land as unmanaged meadow, native plantings, and walking paths instead of dense rows of graves — that's part of what makes them 'green' rather than a lawn cemetery with a smaller footprint. The calculator reserves 30% of your entered acreage for that buffer and only tiles graves into the remaining 70%, so raising total acreage increases plot capacity roughly in proportion but never uses the whole parcel.

Each grave is modeled as an 8x3.5 ft footprint, then padded on every side by your chosen plot spacing (4-20 ft) to get a total unit size. The calculator divides the usable burial area (70% of total acreage, converted to square feet) by that padded unit area and rounds down to a whole number of plots, so tighter spacing always yields more plots per acre than wider spacing.

A shroud is just fabric wrapping, so it carries a flat $400 cost, versus $1,200 for a cardboard or softwood biodegradable casket and $2,500 for a wicker/willow casket. Container cost is only one of six line items in the per-burial total (plot, container, opening/closing, GPS marker, body prep, and optional tree), so switching from wicker to shroud saves $2,100 per burial but doesn't change the plot, marker, or preparation costs.

No — they're flat per-burial multipliers, not measurements tied to your specific container or plot choice. The calculator assumes every avoided traditional burial skips about 3 gallons of embalming fluid and about 3,000 lbs (1.5 tons) of vault concrete, then multiplies those constants by your number of burials, regardless of which container type you selected.