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Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of pollutants
- andrew_ 8y agoFascinating. I had often wondered about cemeteries being used as an "ideal" disposal site for toxic material. Given that no other use for the property would likely take hold. What I didn't consider was the groundwater contamination that could occur.
- creep 8y agoI just always thought, "ehhh we've been burying our dead since the dawn of human existence. I'm sure they've figured out the groundwater situation by now." Now I'm spooked.
- village-idiot 8y agoYes, we have. But we also typically just tossed the corpse into a pine box and buried it. 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.
- paulpauper 8y agoyeah what's the deal with these massive plush caskets. it's being lowered gentry into the ground, not dropped from an airplane.
- village-idiot 8y agoAlso, the occupant is dead.
- notduncansmith 8y agoI assume that "gentry" was a typo there, but in fact the massive plush caskets are precisely because of the gentry being lowered into the ground. Once nice caskets became a status symbol, it was considered crass to put your dead relatives in an ecologically-responsible plain wooden box.
- ars 8y ago> it was considered crass to put your dead relatives in an ecologically-responsible plain wooden box. 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.
- mmmBacon 8y agoIt’s usually cemeteries that require vaults and caskets not the government.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoA cynic in me thinks that if you wake up in the middle of being lowered into the ground, you won't be heard and rescued.
- creep 8y agoYeah, it's true. And I personally hate the thought of my bones sitting in a box in the ground. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial
- zeroname 8y agoDisposing of human remains in a regular cemetery is safe as well, unless maybe you drill a well right next to it. 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.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoThe fully opinioned coffin now comes with heated seats and mirrors, adaptive cruise control, and a hybrid turbo diesel-electric engine that only sort-of-cheats on emissions. 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?
- dmurray 8y ago> 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.
- selimthegrim 8y agoHow did the Japanese do it with night soil then? Did they burn it before using it as fertilizer?
- Nasrudith 8y agoHaving a more or less vegetarian diet helps it some at least - less trophic layers since the diet is more akin to other herbivores although not as fibrous as grazers. Since fish was far less spread before advances in refrigeration and transportation those inland more would have been more subsidence farmer involuntarily vegan - let alone the increased acceptance of meat.
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- la6470 8y agoThat is why follow the tradition of Hinduism and cremate the dead body after donating the valid organs.
- madengr 8y agoI suppose people will complain about cremation not being carbon neutral. Liquification seems to be the way to go, or perhaps soylent green. Why not just fed to hogs?
- Invictus0 8y agoThe article gives only the most passing nod towards cremation: is cremation a more environmentally sound option? How are cadavers donated to science disposed of?
- creep 8y agoThat would be hard to measure, but I'm sure if we all started cremating our dead the environmental cost would go up significantly. I found a list [1] of cremation rate by country. For quite a few countries, the majority of people cremate their dead (religious reasons, usually), but there's still a minority elsewhere. 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_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cremation...
- folli 8y agoWhy would the environmental cost of cremation be higher than of burying? The required land for a cemetery alone has a huge environmental cost.
- creep 8y agoI said it was hard to measure, not that the cost is greater. I don't know if it is or isn't.
- Udik 8y ago> freezing and shaking method sounds pretty good in terms of environmental cost. 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.
- siberianbear 8y agoThere a more environmentally sound form of disposing of bodies called alkaline hydrolysis [1] 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-cremation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/business/flameless-cremat...
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- adreamingsoul 8y agothe fact that we consider dead human bodies “gross” is concerning to me. Human “waste” isn’t at all toxic waste. In fact, it’s rich in nutrients that can be reabsorbed back into the soil for future food production.
- waterpowder 8y agoDid you read the article? Human bodies are full of toxic compounds nowadays
- MertsA 8y agoIt's not the body itself, it's the embalming fluid, caskets, paints, etc that make up more mass that the body that are the problem. There's nothing fundamentally more toxic about the corpse of a human vs. the carcass of a cow.
- robotresearcher 8y agoMaybe not more toxic, but more of a biohazard due to human-specific viruses and bacteria.
- MertsA 8y agoFair enough and a good point, but by the time a body is interred that's irrelevant. There's obviously a fair bit of viruses and bacteria that will thrive (or just survive if a virus) in a corpse but stuff like HIV, Hepatitis, Syphilis, etc are going to die with the body. If it's human specific, it's going to be too specific to survive much longer than the human did. There's stuff like MRSA (or any staph infection for that matter) to worry about but that's no different than the carcass of a cow.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoThe article seemed mostly concerned with the breakdown products of corpses sealed coffins, the coffins themselves, our implants and jewellery, and infection disease. At a glance most of these seem like relatively easy problems to solve.
- rustcharm 8y agoNow that we have refrigeration there's no need for "embalming". My family's religious tradition calls for _no_ embalming and burial in an un-adorned, un-finished pine box. This will also save people a lot of money that's simply wasted and better spent on the living.
- hyperpape 8y agoThere are natural burials available in most states in the continental US, and if I can arrange it for myself, I will (once you are married, it is no longer a one person decision). 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.
- omgtehlion 8y agoIt is all good. But I suppose we have more garbage problems to solve. 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.
- jwr 8y agoThis is the way we "deal" with most problems. We say "butwhatabout" [insert something else here], which is a great excuse to do nothing. It's callet "whataboutism" and will quite likely eradicate humanity within the next hundred years or so, as we destroy our planet, all the while saying "butwhatabout" and pointing fingers.
- nathancahill 8y agoOn the other hand, we have "feel good solutions" like banning plastic straws, so people can pat themselves on the back for helping to solve the problems.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoMy favourite is soy / almond milk etc. 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.
- eschutte2 8y agoThose aren't called milk because they're a substitute for anything, they're called milk because that's the English word for a cloudy translucent liquid. See also milk glass, milk thistle, and milk of magnesia. Speaking for myself, I drink almond milk because it tastes better than cow milk.
- shironineja 8y agoOne of the proposed linked options is the Mushroom Death Suit from TED 2016. Sounds good to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7rS_d1fiUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7rS_d1fiUc
- admiralEyebrows 8y agoThat left me with a peaceful sense of my own mortality. I was not expecting that this afternoon, thank you for sharing.
- shironineja 8y agoHuman composting is also an option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRsopS7yTG8 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-corpse-compost/ https://www.wired.com/2016/10/inside-machine-will-turn-corps...
- zeroname 8y ago> 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. 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_the_environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(element)#Releases_in_...
- harimau777 8y agoThat is deeply disturbing. I'd be fine with cremation or decomposing naturally but there is no way I would ever want a loved one to be buried that way.
- gpderetta 8y agoPersonally I would go for a sky burial but I doubt it would scale. Edit: to be honest, just for myself, I don't think I would want it for any loved one.
- nimbius 8y agoI work as a professional mechanic for a small chain of truck repair shops in the midwest. This reminds me of a customer we had who owned a cemetery and was having a hard time with their front end loader...specifically, the tires. 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.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoI'm always surprised how few identified Superfund sites there are.
- nimish 8y agoIt's a lot easier to toss some dirt over the land and water you polluted. With deregulatory fervor on the rise, it shouldn't be surprising that there's fewer identified sites.
- mousadafousa 8y agoCould you explain what a superfund site is?
- grzm 8y ago> "Superfund is a United States federal government program designed to fund the cleanup of sites contaminated with hazardous substances and pollutants. Sites managed under this program are referred to as "Superfund" sites." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund
- Beltiras 8y agoI've asked my lone offspring to dispose of my bodily remains in the most convenient way possible when the time comes. The only request I make of him is that nobody reserves a place on earth in my name. No headstone or any of that.
- MiddleEndian 8y agoIn theory if tombstones are to last forever, the whole world would eventually become graveyards.
- hannasanarion 8y agoPermanent individual graves is a modern anglosphere thing. In Europe, grave plots are normally rented, and if the family stops paying, the remains are moved to a mass grave or cremated and the plot is re-used.
- ryacko 8y ago“cemetery associations often are required to establish and fund perpetual or maintenance trust funds” 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.
- Alex3917 8y ago> Graveyards are hardly subsidized How much in land taxes do they pay?
- alexis_fr 8y ago“Permanent” tombstones are often limited to 30 years. It’s probable I will lay in my grand parents cemetery, but probably not alongside them.
- docbrown 8y agoIf there’s a 30 year limit, why are tombstones that are >30yrs still standing in most cases? 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.
- SubiculumCode 8y agoPlease someone think of our future anthropologists? For them, cremation is not the answer.
- Retra 8y agoWhat are they going to learn that they wouldn't learn from our literature?
- sctb 8y agoWell, I happen to think an anthropologist would be just fine. They'd say, “Oh! They cremated themselves then.”
- SubiculumCode 8y agoFine fine. I get it. Let's just limit my comment to genetic anthropologists and those who like to study bones.
- sctb 8y agoThat wouldn't do, it'd be discriminatory—anthropologistist even.
- notduncansmith 8y agoI disagree, though I'm no anthropologistist apologist.
- jedberg 8y agoHere is a business I'd like to see exist, but I currently don't have the expertise or time to make it happen: 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.
- Nasrudith 8y agoSpace launching is very expensive and rockets are about as explosive and volatile as constructing giant towers of fuel sounds like. While radiation is often exaggerated in its danger there are legitimate reasons why one doesn't want high energy radioactives to possibly wind up released in the atmosphere. The boring and saner approach is just to do traditional funerary options and use the money left over to help fund space research.
- zeroname 8y ago> Space launching is very expensive and rockets are about as explosive and volatile as constructing giant towers of fuel sounds like. 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?
- ckdarby 8y agoWhy do graveyards exist? Do they provide any value? Do they generate profit at least? I'm trying to grasp how society continues having them aside from a religious standpoint.
- redial 8y ago> Do they provide any value? 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.
- gruez 8y agosame reason golf courses exist
- claudiawerner 8y ago"Value" determined in terms of economics is an economism, it is a very specific (and modern) way of viewing the world. It is not the resolution for why society has many of the things it does, nor in my opinion should it be. Where's the value in philosophy, or writing comments on Hacker News? Reading books and writing poetry? Spending time with the family?
- Nasrudith 8y agoThey make quiet and peaceful neighbors in all seriousness - aside from desire to visit having the land set aside, undeveloped, and more noise than the occasional sobbing and crying of a funeral being viewed as taboo is itself contributes to things that some people want in residential areas. People differ in preferences of course.
- la6470 8y agoThat is why the Hindu ritual of cremeating a body after death is so scientific.
- pankajdoharey 8y agoI think a way forward for the future would be if people cremate their dead instead by burying them, and throw the ash into the sea. This should mostly destroy toxic pollutants and would prevent the leaking of human bodily salts and other pollutants into ground water.
- dwyerm 8y agoMy hometown is a little mountain enclave way above a reasonable altitude that ends up spreading a LOT of grit on the roads to combat snow and ice. Over the years, that grit had turned into unsightly berms lining the highway. The highway department began scraping up this grit and trucking it to the landfill. 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. :)