Cooperative Funeral Home to build Sudbury's 2nd crematorium in Chelmsford

Morning North5:42Sudbury getting a second crematorium

Growing demand is behind the move to build a second crematorium in Sudbury. Daniel Johnston is the manager of the Co-operative Funeral Home, where the new crematorium will be built. He spoke with the CBC's Marina von Stackelberg.

The city of Sudbury has given a funeral home the go-ahead to build Sudbury's second crematorium.

Cooperative Funeral Home general manager Daniel Johnston said he's been working on getting a crematorium for the last 10 years. It's a difficult process because it requires many permits and applications from environmental testing to community authorization, Johnston said.

Despite improvements in technology, people are still uneasy about what goes into the air during cremation.

"Nobody wants to think that there's particles of any cremated human body that's going to be flying around in the atmosphere," he said.

"Everybody kind of perceives that's got to be part of Uncle Charlie. And it really isn't."

He said modern crematoriums are computerized.

"Everything is so precise nowadays that the actual stacks on the crematorium will measure any particulate going up the stacks. If anything too large is going up the stack it automatically closes down the whole process."

Cremation on the rise

Johnston said his group wanted to have its own crematorium because more people, including 85 per cent of his clients, are choosing cremation.

With only one other crematorium in Sudbury and often a several-day wait for service there definitely is a need for another crematorium, Johnston said.

The president of the Ontario Funeral Service Association said he's seen a spike in cremation, although he thinks it is starting to level off.

Cremation can be cheaper than burying a full casket, especially as space in cemeteries fills up, Scott Davidson said. Many are also choosing cremation because it avoids embalming fluids and chemically treated coffins.

"A lot of them choose cremation for environmental reasons," but there are pros and cons, he said, adding that a lot of fuel is needed to cremate a body.

More than 60 per cent of people who die in the province will be cremated, he said, but "a lot of people don't know the actual process."

"Burial is something they know. They've been to a grave site. They've witnessed it. They understand it. And yet they're choosing [cremation], something that they don't fully understand," he said.

The Cooperative Funeral home hopes to start build its crematorium at their property inChelmsford this spring.