About once a month they were spending a few thousand dollars on new tires for this brand new Kubota LA525. The tires would show excessive wear and, curiously enough, enormous golf ball sized holes that look like they were burned through with a torch. we all figured it was vandalism.

We'd recently unmounted one of the tires to replace it when a golf-ball chunk of white rock fell out and shot across the shop floor with a startling bang. Curious, I took it to our OSHA office and our inspector nearly screamed, 'Thats phosphorous!' Turns out the cemetery was built on an old lot used by a chemical transportation company. It also explained why the sod was being replaced about twice a year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Mine

"Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide?"

https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/indices/book...

Chemophobiacs may remember Edward Tyczkowski, featured here in a breathless Salon article: https://www.salon.com/2004/03/23/armageddon/

He was a very talented fluorine chemist, who ran a custom synthesis and contract research outfit out of a shed in the ghetto somewhere in the South. From colleagues who knew him I understand that he was a true gentleman and righteous. He wasn't known for mishaps, but when he retired he left behind cylinders of sulfur tetrafluoride (10 times more toxic than phosgene) and perfluoroisobutylene (100 times more toxic than phosgene, supposedly the Russians had a stash because it passes through your regular gas masks) and much other stuff.

A trained chemist knows how to use SF4 without incident (I have done so myself), but it's remarkable that Tyczkowski, who recruited his workers from the ghetto - Apartheid was strong in the 1960s Southern US, didn't have deaths amongst his workforce. It shows what properly training one's workforce can do. Meanwhile Information Technology tries to achieve the perfect fit through endless rounds of interviewing and teambuilding and keeps failing.

I'm sure there's a bunch of other fields represented here.

Recently I finished house renovation and paid (not a small sum) to dispose of almost 3 metric tons of "cunstruction garbage". It contains metals, rocks, different finishes, detergents, fire retardants, plastics, glass, stained wood, paints with whatewer inside...

So in my lifetime I will produce ~70kg of corpse garbage + coffin etc, and compare this to 3000kg. Well I do not know what is more dangerous... Add to this usual daily household garbage, which is not sorted and recycled 100%, I find body disposal not the most pressing problem.

Not sure why this article shits on cremation though, the greenhouse gases emitted seem truly minor.

Re cremation: I have heard, that to reduce a body to nice ashes takes a lot of heat and requires too much natural gas or whatever they burn in your local crematorium. Bodies do not vurn by themselves, and if you use just enough fuel to set it on fire, you’ll get bad smelling and bad looking coal-like substance covering bones...

That alkaline reduction seems ok though.

Or being an American for ~3 days.

We have far larger fish to fry.

Well, I paid for it to be produced. If I would not commission this, less paints and other chemicals would be required. Less coal would be burnt to produce cement used to create concrete.

1. We must do something!

2. Banning straws is something!

3. We did it!!

If you don’t drink milk, why do you need a substitute? A substitute that comes in difficult to recycle aluminium-paper-plastic laminated cartons that still contain most of the food-miles and process / handling carbon emissions.

Ok, hipocricy is everywhere and we can’t all be angels over night.

Speaking for myself, I drink almond milk because it tastes better than cow milk.

Also, where I live, dairy comes in those tetrapaks, too.

It's something sorta similar to milk that can be used in roughly the same applications - lighten coffee, moisten cereal, baking, sauces, fold into mashed potatoes, etc.

I prefer the taste of pretty much all nut milks to cows milk, personally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7rS_d1fiUc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRsopS7yTG8

Every year > 130M humans are born and >55M humans die. As mentioned in above article / video cremation isn't a very good option either as it ejects over 5,000 lbs of mercury into the atmosphere yearly.

Seattle trying to help make human composting happen:

https://www.wired.com/2016/10/inside-machine-will-turn-corps...

That's pretty much irrelevant. Half of the mercury in the atmosphere is released naturally. The other half is mostly coal plants. Then there's some industrial processes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(element)#Releases_in_...

Edit: to be honest, just for myself, I don't think I would want it for any loved one.

To be left outside with a stout stick, so my corpse can either be eaten by dogs, or fight them off should it find this upsetting.

Graveyards are hardly subsidized, they are for-profit businesses, and even if they run out of space, could survive through two major depressions before bankruptcy.

How much in land taxes do they pay?

Estimates are for 100 billion humans have ever lived, plus (currently) 255 human births per minute (and falling) = 331,017 years

One of the oldest cemeteries in my town has dates going as far back as mid-1800s and I don’t think they go through periodically and dig bodies up.

I'm going with this method when I eventually die.

I kind of wanted to be shot into deep space, but eaten by worms seems more apt.

It's extremely informative and promotes a natural look at death and the necessary arrangements you can make.

If the odds are 1%, or 0.01%, it’s still personally worthwhile.

To put it bluntly (and give a contrived, fictitious example), a religion that believes in a flat earth that rests on the back of a unicorn that was created by a committee of gods 34 months ago (complete with false evidence and memories of what happened before) based on an idiosyncratic interpretation of the New Testament that demands that you give 75% of your money to The Glorious Spiritual Leader and then have sex with him, would be particularly improbable compared to almost any other religion.

But, more seriously, part of me hopes that I'll recognize when my time is coming and be able to just wander off into the woods or something and die that way, with my body left where it drops. Even though I feel like that might be against what the article is suggesting.

Please don't do that. It sucks seriously for the people who have to go find you when the missing person report is filed, and it really, really sucks for the "doesn't know what is going on" person who finds your body. Predators are not exactly 100% effective.

Conversely, if you want to fake your own death, disappearing in the wilderness ("hiking accident") is one of the most reliable and plausible cover stories. People who disappear at sea wash up on shore a hell of a lot more often than people who disappear in the wilderness are ever seen.

To me a headstone or other grave marking is a way to help those who grieve the loss.

Can you explain why you don't want one?

If you can handle the morbidity of it, you can arrange for your own burial or cremation and even pay ahead of time; there are usually big discounts, since they can't shake you down the same way they can shake down a grieving widow or whatnot.

I'm not a purist, and think a rough-hewn headstone makes sense to me, but I can't imagine that a natural burial somewhere many miles outside of town would be a contamination risk.

Now I'm spooked.

Now we bury a hell of a lot more than just the corpse.

Coffins in particular are just straight up weird to me. Polished and plush, why? They even come with rubber gaskets to “protect” your now ex-loved one, which is quite creepy when you think it through.

I really like the thought of the "sky burial"[1]. Basically, they bring your remains to the top of a mountain and wait for vultures to clean off the bones. Then the bones are crushed into a powder and mixed with something called tsampa for the crows and other birds to eat afterwards. It seems like a safe way to dispose of remains, is spiritually significant (to me), and is actually useful to the ecosystem. Unfortunately, it's very costly on time.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial

You know what excretes far more E. Coli than a dead body? A living body. That bacterium is basically everywhere where there are animals, infections are pretty common.

Plus, if you have any of those artificial things that the article mentions, that will still have to be disposed of otherwise, lest the bird eat it.

> Then the bones are crushed into a powder and mixed with something called tsampa for the crows and other birds to eat afterwards.

Sounds like yet another great way to catch an E. Coli infection: Grinding down bone contaminated with bird poop.

I joke, but: funerals are as expensive as a secondhand car.

Whereas I figure I’ll die at home and my dogs will eat me before anybody realises. Much cheaper.

I only sort of joke here: all the bits of cows, sheep, and pigs, we don’t want to eat we turn in to other products. Why can’t we do the same for human bodies? I mean, so long as the person didn’t die of infectious disease their remains could probably be recycled in to the biosphere?

Human bodies are full of parasites and pathogens that are dangerous to humans: just because someone got hit by a car doesn't make their body sterile. That's one reason the BSE (mad cow disease) spread, feeding cows to other cows. It's also a reason we don't generally fertilize crops with human waste, although horse or cow manure works very well.

So we probably can recycle human bodies, but there are extra genuine health concerns. One pretty safe way is to bury them in the ground and let them get eaten by worms - but as the article points out, even that comes with health risks.

I agree with your general point about extra genuine health concerns.

It's possible to make it safe through composting, but that requires more time and skill than a typical compost heap. Most composting authorities recommend keeping cat and dog faeces - less dangerous than human waste, but much worse than cow manure - out of the garden compost heap.

Not to mention other incentive reasons - turning human remains into profit makes for bad incentives for the living. Instead of just leaving them to rot completely they end up being a public health risk, upsetting families with grave robbery, and possible murder for the sake of profit. There is a reason why the medical profession switched to plastic and it isn't because plastic of a perfectly anatomical match is less expensive.

The Jewish religion requires plain boxes, to show that by death everyone is equal, rich and poor.

It's actually preferable to have no box at all (because it slows decomposition), but US laws prevent that. So a plain wooden box with nothing that doesn't decompose is used.

We launch people's whole dead bodies into space in specially crafted capsules. First we flash freeze the body here on Earth. Then we put it in the capsule and launch it towards a star that we think has earth-like exoplanets.

The capsule itself has a small nuclear power supply, a cryogenic system, a few astronomy instruments and a little bit of AI. The idea would be that in the cold of space, the cryo-system would need almost no energy to keep the body frozen, and otherwise it would be like a mini-Voyager with some AI in it. As it travels, it would send back science data, and use the AI to make minor adjustments to its orbit as it got closer to that other solar system in millions of years, to attempt to put itself into orbit around an Earth-like exoplanet.

Why do this?

1. The customer gets to have their body float through space for millennia. Cool!

2. Humanity gets the benefit of all the science data that would come back from all these mini-Voyagers going in all different directions.

3. In the incredibly off-chance that any of this works as intended, your body ends up in orbit around an exoplanet.

4. There is a very very very tiny chance that you end up in orbit around a civilization that has the ability to retrieve your body and reanimate it.

We are floating through space. In a huge spacecraft called earth. Aren't we?

The boring and saner approach is just to do traditional funerary options and use the money left over to help fund space research.

I think it's understood that this won't be cheap. But what about this "safety issue"? We're talking about a dead body. Yes, there's a chance the rocket will explode, but that would be a pretty cool "burial" as well.

> The boring and saner approach is just to do traditional funerary options and use the money left over to help fund space research.

So, you're proposing that instead of spending a hundred million dollars on a space burial, I spend a few grand on a regular burial and donate the rest to "space research". That's still insane but now you killed the incentive.

In all seriousness, cryochambers in space are vital space research, so why not start out with dead bodies of rich humans?

The environmental benefits of alkaline hydrolysis are significant. Its carbon footprint is about a tenth of that caused by burning bodies. Mr. Wilson said liquefaction uses a fraction of the energy of a standard cremator and releases no fumes.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/business/flameless-cremat...

In Leuven in Belgium the Vesalius Institute administers this. The remains are normally buried in a part of the municipal cemetery called the 'Anatomy Field'. There's small gravestones with the names. I think it's kind of nice.

You can, however, arrange cremation or burial wherever you please.

I think the freezing and shaking method sounds pretty good in terms of environmental cost.

1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cremation...

Freeze dried? I'd be glad to have an instant version of myself- two teaspoons in hot water, stir, and you can chat with your dead uncle for an hour or so. That is, until the jar is empty.

In the UK, by incineration.

[0] https://www.ciwm-journal.co.uk/downloads/Healthcare-Waste-WE...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_farm

The cemetery caretaker saw this and said, "Hey, I always need fill dirt. Why don't you drop off a load or two with me!" And they did so. And this dirt has been used to backfill a number of graves, including my grandmother's.

Now, she was a salty old woman in her time, but her time ended nearly a decade ago... but there's still no grass that will grow on her plot.

Oops. :)

I'm trying to grasp how society continues having them aside from a religious standpoint.

Yes. In fact, they provide "invaluable" emotional value.

> Do they generate profit at least?

Some do, after all they are like any other low margin business.

At a glance most of these seem like relatively easy problems to solve.