The western cultural expectation of spending a lot of money on embalming, then dressing the dead in fancy expensive clothing and putting them in a $5000 ornate wood coffin which will immediately go into the ground to rot is perverse. It has created economic incentives on the part of funeral services corporations to extract as much money from a grieving family as possible.

This is basically it. Particularly in the US where a burial has become astonishingly crass and perverse.

The size of the plot and headstone. The common use of heavyweight steel for coffins that can delay decomposition even longer. Concrete grave linings. Cremation is no better from an impact perspective.

I think they may be aiming for corpses that hang around as long as ancient Egypt achieved. :)

> Particularly in the US where a burial has become astonishingly crass and perverse.

Ever been to cemeteries in Paris? Giant monuments, incredibly ornate graves.. The US is far more modest by comparison.

You mean the 2 or 3 hundred year old ones? Victorians were often crass too. I meant in the current era.

I agree that there is a financial incentive in the funeral industry. But...

In general, humanity has buried and burned people with expensive objects to show reverence or recognize status. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, etc. It's kind of a tradition to waste a bunch of money on the dead!

If it were all transparent and above-board, and people knew what they were paying for and why, I'd agree. But that's not really the case. My father died a few years ago, and it was obvious that the funeral home staff relies on you being in a compromised emotional state, such that you'll just say yes to anything and not question the price.

Jewish law prohibits embalming, too. And tradition calls for a plain casket, usually pine, unlined, and with no metal parts (wooden pegs hold it together.)

What is the difference between “composting” and “buried directly without preservative”? I am fairly certain it amounts to much the same thing.

It doesn’t. Composting and burying leaves for example aren’t the same thing.

Composting provides extra oxygen and whatever other steps are necessary to accelerate the decomposition process.

A buried body can last many years, especially if it’s several feet into the clay layer.

Try it. Bury a cat or dog six feet under and come back in five years. If it’s common clay, a large percentage will still be there.

> A buried body can last many years, especially if it’s several feet into the clay layer.

And in some cases (e.g. peat) "many" can end up being "hundreds" or even "thousands".

Sorry, I was unclear: I meant “much the same thing on the timescales at which buried humans are likely to be disturbed”, so 50-100 years at a minimum.

I imagine it will be at least that long, and likely much longer, until the land used for cemeteries is repurposed.

This feels like snake oil. A grave without cremation has to be way less energy consuming than controlled "compostation".

The difference is that you can't bury a body in a garden, for example (for sanitary reasons). But after it is properly composted, what you have is, well, compost. Which can then be placed somewhere and a tree planted in it, for example - and then you have a living gravestone.