Zutphen council to promote burials as alternative to crematoria

Officials in the Gelderland town of Zutphen are considering actively promoting burials after the arrival of a crematorium hit council income, the AD said on Thursday.

They have even drafted an advertising leaflet promoting burials after making a €7,000 loss on the town’s cemeteries last year, the AD said. The crematorium opened five years ago and since then the number of burials has slumped from daily to two per week.

‘People don’t want to saddle their relatives with the high cost of taking care of a grave,’ Wim van Midwoud, of the Dutch cemetery association, told the paper.

Now in Zutphen fewer than one in four locals are buried in the town’s cemeteries.

The council is therefore considering introducing themed sections in its cemeteries, such as a butterfly field and pixie wood. Officials have also renamed the burial grounds as ‘gedenkparken’, or memory parks.

Officials still have their doubts about the marketing campaign but point out that crematoria already advertise their services. ‘We’ve developed some fine plans for our memory parks and we want to tell people about them,’ a spokesman told the paper.