Starting Saturday, a Westmoreland County funeral home and owners of nearby Rose Memorial Park will begin offering green burials, an eco-friendly way of burying the dead that can be cheaper than a traditional funeral.

A green burial eliminates embalming, metal or tropical wood caskets and burial vaults. Instead, the body is covered in a shroud, placed inside a biodegradable wooden or cardboard box -- an ecopod -- and buried. A tree or flat stone often marks the grave, which is typically 3 1/2 feet deep instead of 6 feet because there's no concrete vault.

Jews and Muslims have practiced green burial for centuries, but the concept is growing in popularity among others for several reasons.

For environmentalists, a green burial ground conserves land that would otherwise be developed and offers people an alternative to the costly embalming, fancy caskets and concrete vaults that often make up the modern funeral. For funeral homes and cemeteries that have lost business to an increase in cremations, green burials present a marketing opportunity.

While several local funeral homes and cemeteries have expressed interest in offering green burials, the Westmoreland County venture is the first in the region to promote it for everyone.

Three acres have been set aside for green burials in the 10-acre Rose Memorial Park in Acme, said Patricia Dangelo, one of the cemetery's shareholders. The cemetery is partnering with Saloom Funeral Home in nearby Mount Pleasant to handle the burials.

Rick Rega, a funeral director at Saloom, said he will offer green burial packages ranging from $2,700 to $4,700. He is sending a letter to all funeral homes within a 75-mile radius of his business to notify them.

"I do have the biodegradable caskets. They are made of bamboo or some type of biodegradable material," he said, adding that he also will sell eco-friendly urns in which to bury cremated remains.

A traditional American funeral costs about $6,500, said Joe Sehee, executive director of the national Green Burial Council, which has 130 funeral homes in its network. But by the time a burial plot is purchased, the grave opened and closed and a marker installed, the total cost jumps to $10,000 or higher.

One of the largest expenses is the casket and embalming. Standards set by the Pennsylvania state board of funeral directors say that human remains held for longer than 24 hours should be embalmed and sealed in a container that will not let odors escape, or be refrigerated. But there is no law in Pennsylvania that requires embalming, although directors in the state's 1,600 funeral homes do it routinely after obtaining permission from families.

In green burials, Mr. Rega said his funeral home will offer a private viewing of the unembalmed body to family members. "We do have an opportunity to do an identification viewing. We do make the person presentable.

"If they are requesting an open casket viewing, we must do embalming. That's a state law," Mr. Rega said.

People seeking green burials believe they're doing something good for the earth; the higher purpose of the movement is to conserve land that otherwise would be developed and return it to its natural state, Mr. Sehee said.

Daniel T. D'Alessandro, who runs the D'Alessandro Funeral Home and Crematory in Lawrenceville, said he has already done green burials for poor clients at Greenwood Cemetery on Kittanning Pike in O'Hara.

"Fifty percent of people who are planning on having their remains cremated are very interested in finding out about green burial. They can still have a brief service," Mr. D'Alessandro said.

He acknowledged that "cemeteries are getting hit hard by the cremation trend. Lots of cemeteries have undeveloped land. Chances are it's never going to be sold anyway," he said.

When Mr. Sehee encourages funeral directors to offer green burial, he tells them that, "It's more profitable to do a whole body green burial than cremation in almost every instance."

In 2005, Pennsylvania ranked fourth for the highest number of cremations in the nation, according to the Cremation Association of North America. (California ranked first with 120,883.) That same year, Pennsylvania recorded 35,042 cremations, representing 27 percent of the deaths in the state. In 2006, the total number of cremations was 36,516 or 29 percent of the state's deaths.