patrick.net

Beyond the familiar “green burial” business of escaping the toxic culture of the conventional death industry, what I particularly like is the idea of using the cost of burials to buy and preserve undeveloped land — a relatively new wrinkle in the world of dead things. It just seems so much more appealing than the alternatives.

The funeral industry has endeavored lately to give cremation a rosy environmental glow. There’s lots of talk about recycling lightly singed titanium implants. In Redditch, England, the heat generated in a local crematory from the fat of the dearly departed now gets piped over — I’m not making this up — to warm the water in a town swimming pool. But the typical cremation still produces a disturbing mix of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. And somebody always gets stuck with the ashes.

Alkaline hydrolysis, originally devised to dispose of animal carcasses, is a bit better. Rebranded as “bio-cremation,” it entails dissolving the corpse in a stainless steel tank filled with water and potassium hydroxide. That minimizes the carbon footprint, and the resulting fluid “can then be recycled,” according to a study in the journal Mortality, at the local wastewater treatment plant — that is, with the sewage.

Conventional burial aspires to make death somewhat more antiseptic. But it annually doses the soil in the United States with more than 800,000 gallons of toxic embalming fluids. Manufacturing a steel coffin also produces four times the carbon dioxide released in a typical cremation, and we bury more than 800,000 such coffins every year, plus many, many tons of concrete burial vaults.

Full Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/opinion/sunday/death-cremation-.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article

#Science #Medicine #Death #Dying