Cardboard coffin in Hong Kong (China)

As the death toll spiked due to a severe COVID-19 outbreak in Hong Kong (China) last month, demand for coffins also skyrocketed, making it difficult for suppliers to meet demand. . One solution has been applied, simultaneously solving two problems: lack of coffins and limiting environmental pollution, that is, using cardboard coffins.

Cardboard coffins are not yet popular in Hong Kong (China), where there is a long tradition of using wooden coffins. Therefore, in order to gradually familiarize people with this new type of coffin, an NGO called Forget Thee Not, donated 300 cardboard coffins to hospitals during the COVID-19 wave. This idea quickly received support from sponsors.

Albert Ko – Managing Director, Forget Thee Not Foundation, said: “In hospitals, a lot of bodies cannot be handled in time, many of them are stored in body bags. This causes at least two problems, one is that hospitals are running out of space, and two is for the patient’s family, which is not in a good mood.”

Body bags of people who died of COVID-19 are placed next to the beds of patients in Hong Kong in early March. Photo: Hong Kong Free Press.

Cardboard coffins help bodies to be handled more quickly and promptly, instead of waiting for wooden coffins to be brought. By a cardboard coffin can be made at the manufacturing facility in as little as an hour after receiving the order. This type of coffin can also be personalized according to different designs.

“Due to the patients’ deaths from COVID-19, the family members had to close the coffins to prevent the virus from spreading. We were therefore able to print a photo of the deceased on the coffin to allow the family to truly saw the face of the deceased for the last time,” said Albert Ko.

Most of the bodies in Hong Kong (China) during the recent epidemic were cremated instead of buried, the cover coffin will also help reduce the burden on the environment than wooden coffins. In Hong Kong, nearly 8,000 people have died from COVID-19 since the pandemic began, many of them older, unvaccinated people.

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