Cardboard coffin maker eyes green funerals’ potential in East Asia, but meets resistance in its home market, Hong Kong
- LifeArt makes eco-friendly cardboard caskets and coffins in Hong Kong. When burned they emit 87 per cent less greenhouse gas than chipboard or fibreboard ones
- The city’s funeral industry is largely resistant to the green funeral trend, believing the coffins look cheap and that their use will earn them less profit
The robot arm zooms back and forth in the workshop of LifeArt in Hong Kong, shaping a sheet of thick, hard cardboard into a modern and environmentally kind cardboard coffin, or eco-coffin.
Wilson Tong, chief representative of LifeArt, the only manufacturer of eco-friendly cardboard caskets and coffins in Hong Kong, believes they are the way of the future. Tong has a vision of automation, precision, environmentalism and growing eco-coffin exports across Asia.
“We use board imported from Germany and special corrugated cardboard from the US, and we use Japanese technology to make it stronger,” Tong says at the company’s workshop in Aberdeen, on the south side of Hong Kong Island. “The advantage of those kinds of boards is they reduce the use of materials from trees. They save 80 per cent compared with chipboard or MDF [medium-density fibreboard, another wood product].”
According to LifeArt the special boards are made using wood fibres from “sustainable forestry operations, forestry or agricultural by-products, or recycled wood fibres”, and when burned they emit 87 per cent less greenhouse gas than chipboard or MDF.