Shanghai is to launch a campaign urging more of its residents to choose green burials in the coming five years.

The city wants the number of people opting for green burials to increase from the existing 20 percent to 30 percent.

Green burials usually refer to sea burials, where ashes are scattered at sea; tree burials, where a biodegradable urn is placed under plants; and wall burials, where an urn is placed on a wall.

Shanghai has been promoting green burials since the 1980s, setting itself a target of tree and wall burials for 19 percent of the deceased, and sea burials for 1 percent. The remaining 80 percent choose traditional ground burials.

Wang Hongjie, the president of the Shanghai Funeral Industry Association, told the Global Times that green burials can help save land resources and reduce pollution caused by cremation.

"The cremation of bodies and annual tomb-sweeping cause serious dust and smoke pollution, and those large tombs will increase the usage of stones, not to mention limited plain land resources," he said.

The city opened its first large ecological cemetery on March 20. Covering 8.15 acres, the land-saving and public welfare cemetery offers tree burials, wall burials and small graves, which are less than one-square-meter compared with the traditional three-square-meter tombs.

The cemetery has had 24,417 small graves and 2,437 wall burials, and is expected to provide a total of 100,000 graves to save 16.5 acres of land.

However, some Shanghai residents, such as Zhao Lichen, still prefer ground burials. Zhao said as tombs in Shanghai are expensive, the family decided to bury his grandmother in Taicang, Jiangsu Province, as a tomb there costs just 10,000 yuan (US$1,524).

"We wanted to choose a city-centered cemetery, which would be easier for us to visit for tomb-sweeping, but those graves cost from 60,000 (US$ 9144) to 100,000 yuan (US$15,240) in the center of Shanghai," he said.

"For the older generation, it's important to keep the body complete after death, so we still prefer traditional burials even though we know green burials are cheaper and more environmentally friendly," he added.