CCTV News (News Network): As Qingming Festival approaches, many places across the country are ushering in the peak of memorial service. This year, green and low-carbon worship methods have been popular, and land-saving ecological burial methods such as sea burials and tree burials have gradually become a new trend.
During the Qingming Festival, the civil affairs department introduced online appointments to extend service hours, and free gifts of flowers, yellow ribbons, and message cards to facilitate the public to worship in an orderly manner. More than 1,000 online memorial services have been launched across the country, and civilized green memorial methods such as offering flowers, ribbon blessings, and tree planting commemoration have become the choice of many people.
Recently, the civil affairs departments in Shanghai, Tianjin, Dalian, Qingdao and other places have launched this year's sea burial service. After the ship arrived at the designated waters, the deceased's family gently scattered the ashes and petals of their relatives into the sea to bid farewell to their relatives and express their condolences. Statistics from the Ministry of Civil Affairs show that the number of sea burials nationwide is on the rise year by year. In the past five years, nearly 200,000 deceased have been buried in the sea and returned to nature.
In addition to sea burial, various forms of land-saving burial methods such as tree burial, flower bed burial, and ashes burial have also become a new trend of civilization. Up to now, 28 provinces have introduced rewards and subsidies for ecological burials, and the national ecological burial ratio has reached 4%. All localities have increased the construction of ecological burial facilities in cemeteries and the construction of sea burial memorial facilities and life parks to meet the diverse needs of the people.
