Electric Cremators Cut Carbon Emissions by Up to 90%, But Only 1% of UK Crematoria Have Made the Switch

New research is putting a spotlight on one of the funeral industry's biggest untapped opportunities for cutting carbon emissions: the cremator itself.

According to a new report from Memoria Funerals, electric cremators can lower carbon emissions by 80 to 90 percent compared to the gas fired cremators most UK crematoria still rely on. Despite that gap, only around 1 percent of the UK's cremators currently run on electricity. The remaining 99 percent operate on natural gas or liquefied petroleum gas.

The numbers matter because of scale. The UK carries out roughly 550,000 cremations a year, and a standard gas fired cremation produces between 62kg and 245kg of CO2 per service. Multiplied across half a million services annually, even a modest shift toward electric cremation technology would represent a meaningful reduction in the funeral sector's carbon footprint.

Memoria Group, which commissioned the research, operates the largest number of electric cremators in the UK. Around 21 percent of its facilities use electric cremators, roughly 21 times the national average. The group also holds two of the UK's three platinum Greener Globe accreditations, a recognised standard for environmental performance in the funeral sector.

Memoria Funerals said the funeral sector needs to be more willing to raise environmental questions with families, noting that funeral directors get one chance to arrange a funeral for someone's loved one and that the industry should be braver about having these conversations.

The findings echo guidance published in November 2025 by the Greater South East Net Zero Hub's Crematoria Decarbonisation Toolkit, and are backed by data from the Cremation Society of Great Britain.

For families and funeral homes already thinking about sustainability, this is a reminder that the environmental impact of a funeral isn't limited to the casket. Cremation method, energy source, and even the choice between a cardboard or wicker casket versus a traditional timber or veneer option all play a part in the overall footprint of a service.

The Science Bit: Why Virgin-Grade Corrugated Fibreboard Caskets Are a Natural Match for Electric Cremators

The data raised earlier leads one to an obvious follow up question for anyone specifying or approving what goes into the cremation chamber: Does the casket or coffin itself help or hurt that equation? For corrugated fibreboard (inaccurately named "cardboard") caskets specifically, there's a persistent objection from old data in the cremation industry, worth addressing head on.

The objection: "cardboard burns too fast"

Some crematorium operators argue that cardboard coffins burn away too quickly, forcing the cremator to work harder to hold chamber temperature, and that this pushes total emissions up rather than down. It's a reasonable question to ask. It's also only half right, and the half that's wrong matters.

Same energy, different rate

Corrugated cardboard and dry timber release almost identical energy per kilogram when they burn. Cardboard measures around 14.03 MJ/kg under standard testing, against roughly 14.8 MJ/kg for dry oak. So cardboard isn't a hotter fuel. What's true is that its burn rate is faster: the flutes and thin walls in corrugated fibreboard give it a much higher surface area relative to its mass, than a dense timber panel, so it ignites quickly and releases heat in a shorter burst.

That's where the concern about "working the cremator harder" comes from, and it's a fair observation about the physics. But it only tells half the story, because burn rate on its own doesn't determine total heat released. Mass does.

The mass difference does the heavy lifting

Here's the part that changes the conclusion. Around 95 percent of conventional UK coffins are chipboard or MDF, not solid timber, and they typically weigh around 35kg. A Daisybox fibreboard casket weighs around 7kg. So even though cardboard burns faster per kilogram, there's approximately five times less of it to burn. A faster burn rate applied to a fifth of the mass adds up to a smaller total heat pulse, not a bigger one. The casket isn't the thing driving up the cremator's workload. If anything, it's doing less work than a conventional MDF casket, not more.

There's a second factor conventional caskets carry that corrugated fibreboard doesn't: chipboard/particleboard and MDF are typically bonded with urea formaldehyde resin adhesives, which are a known driver of highly toxic NOx emissions during combustion. Plain corrugated fibreboard has no equivalent resin adhesive load to burn off.

Why this matters even more for electric cremators

Modern cremators, whether gas or electric, don't run on a fixed fuel batch that needs manual compensation. They use continuous, thermocouple fed control systems that modulate heat input in real time to hold a set temperature. The well documented failure mode in this industry isn't a casket burning too fast and underheating the chamber. It's the opposite: excess combustible content, most commonly high body fat, causing the chamber to overshoot and the burner to cut back. A lighter, faster burning secondary fuel load like engineered "cardboard" sits comfortably within what these control systems are already built to manage.

Electric cremators take this a step further. Resistive heating elements respond to a set point with more precision than a gas flame does, without the coffin's combustion contributing unpredictable byproducts to the electric heating process itself. A smaller, cleaner burning secondary fuel load is easier for that kind of system to absorb, not harder. In practice that means a well engineered cardboard casket such as Daisybox, is arguably a better pairing for electric cremation technology than a conventional 35kg MDF or chipboard coffin, not a worse one. Less mass to bring up to temperature, no formaldehyde adhesive load, and a control system already engineered to smooth out fast combustion events.

The regulators agree

This isn't just a Daisybox argument. UK Environment Agency and DEFRA best available techniques guidance for crematoria explicitly treats casket or coffin mass as a "secondary fuel load" that operators should minimise, and estimates that reducing it can cut NOx emissions by around 66 percent and N2O by more than 90 percent. Regulators are pointing operators toward less fibreboard material, not more, which is the opposite direction to the "higher carbon" claim sometimes made against cardboard.

What the track record shows

Daisybox cardboard and wicker caskets have gone through more than 50,000 cremations across nearly every major Australian crematorium over the past ten years. That's a decade of real world operation backing up the physics, not just a lab result.

As electric cremator adoption slowly grows in the UK and elsewhere, the case for pairing that equipment with a lighter, cleaner burning casket only gets stronger. Cardboard doesn't fight the shift to lower carbon cremation. It supports it. Download Daisybox cremation test PDF

Sources: FSRI Materials Database (corrugated cardboard combustion data), EngineeringToolBox (wood combustion heat values), Ben Copeland's dissertation "A comparison of gas and electric cremator emissions in the UK," GOV.UK crematoria best available techniques (BAT) guidance, and Daisybox's own operational record across Australian crematoria. This post follows on from our earlier article on electric cremator adoption in the UK, based on reporting by Pressat and a press release from Memoria Funerals.