18 February 2009

How to dispose of (someone's)(your own) dead body

There is a very interesting article at Slate today on the relative "greenness" of various methods of disposing of one's body after death.

Traditional in-ground burials expend vast amounts of resources for coffins, vaults, etc:
Many cemeteries require coffins to be placed within bunkerlike structures to prevent their neatly manicured grounds from collapsing… estimated that Americans bury more metal each year than was used to make the Golden Gate Bridge and enough concrete to build a two-lane highway from New York to Detroit.
Then there's the embalming fluid, with its (carcinogenic) formaldehyde, and the methane you produce when you decompose anaerobically at that deep burial depth.

Cremation is energy intensive and releases toxic by-products of combustion. There's no discussion of feeding the corpse to buzzards, which is a mainstay in many cultures. The "greenness" calculations themselves are not of interest to me; what got my attention in the article were two new proposed methodologies:
The process of alkaline hydrolysis involves liquefying your body in a solution of lye and water, resulting in a pile of bone ash and a bottle of biofluid that you can pour on your houseplants. One of its leading proponents, a Scotland-based company called Resomation Ltd., claims that the procedure has a carbon footprint 18 times smaller than a typical cremator. In the other procedure, called promession, a corpse gets freeze-dried with liquid nitrogen and then shattered into powder, Terminator-style.
The mind reels...

1 comment:

  1. No longer will I attempt to eat an Oreo cookie while reading TYWKIWDBI.

    ReplyDelete

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