I 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.
It'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.
> "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."
Fun fact: in a single Northwest Territories mine [0] lies an amount of arsenic trioxide dust sufficient to kill every mammal on earth many times over; and in the early '90s an organized labour terrorist planted and detonated a bomb inside the mine, killing nine workers who were there in spite of a strike.
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.
See also http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/index.html. While you're browsing around there, you might also want to pick up a copy of "Ignition!", which I personally liked even better than the Gergel books.
It 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.
Yep, that makes sense. At least garbage is moved far away, so it’s someone else’s problem.
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...
Cremation puts 540 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere; the average human breathing puts out 2.3 pounds of CO2, so it's basically the same as breathing for an extra 234 days.
Also construction waste is a debatable one. Sure it's not good stuff, but did you produce it? Or did you just move it? I'm sure, at least....i hope, whatever you replaced it with in the house is better for the occupants than the materials you removed.
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.
This 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.
On 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.
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.
Those 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.
I don't know anyone who drinks non-dairy milks for concerns over carbon emissions. It's always been one of or a mix of dietary concerns, taste preference, or avoidance of the awful dairy industry.
Also, where I live, dairy comes in those tetrapaks, too.
So? Skim milk tastes nothing like full fat milk, but still has a right to exist.
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.
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:
> 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.
That 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.
I'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.
Permanent 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.
“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.
It depends very much on which country you are from. US/UK seem to have burial plots forever. Many European countries have a rental/lease system where you get the plot for 30-50 years, and that can be extended if wanted by the family/estate/descendants, or the plot is re-used.
Go with a "natural death" arrangement, where your body will not be embalmed (formaldehyde is nasty stuff), and will be buried in a vessel that biodegrades quickly, in a forest or similar area.
Technology to resurrect [them] won't be around for 200 years and at that point the now current nation-state and international contracts won't have any standing. Welcome to being part of a convenient un-rights'ed anonymous forever-slave underclass. It would be interesting to know how best those who select cryonics now will be exploited then. Rich enough to afford it and optimistic and gullible enough to think it will turn out right.
Many aren’t free, but a bigger problem is that many are mutually exclusive. Which one do you go for? It’s not as easy to say “the one I grew up with” as it was in Pascal’s era.
Declining Pascal’s Wager just because two religions are equally probable makes you Buridan’s ass (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass): a donkey who starves to death because he can’t choose between two identical bales of hay. But I think there are probably decision-theoretic ways of even refining Pascal’s Wager; not every religion is mutually exclusive, or holds mutually exclusive beliefs about the afterlife, and not every set of religious beliefs is equally probable. Also, from both an EV and a pure probability perspective, I would tend to avoid religions that seem designed to extract as much money as possible from its followers.
That would literally be a religious argument, so I won't name examples, but many religious beliefs can either be tested empirically, have implications that can be tested empirically. If the religion exists in a social or organizational context where there are obvious vested worldly interests for the leaders of an organization to further certain beliefs (money, power, etc.) and those beliefs are designed to further those worldly interests, that would be a signal of improbability as well. Furthermore, for two sets of religious beliefs that share the same base texts and doctrines, the theological and exegetical doctrines can be judged on their own logic and decide between the two.
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.
Thanks. Would it be reasonable for me to assume that you have a religious belief? I ask because your explanation seems like the kind of reasoning I would have used before I came to believe that no spiritual afterlife was plausible, and that all religions which claimed one were equally untrue (Boltzmann brains and digital afterlives are not spiritual in this sense, as they do not presume a nonphysical soul).
Even if I never have children, I'd rather donate my estate to a worthy cause than spend it on cyrogenically freezing my body with the hope of eventual resurrection.
That doesn't make any sense. Life insurance isn't cheaper if you promise to spend it on cryonic storage. It's just a part of your estate, and there are better things you can do with that.
Well it's technically not part of the estate, but a policy held by the cryonics organization. But that's missing the point. You can pay for cryonics without writing people out of your will.
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.
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.
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.
Hikers disappear all the time and it's rare for bodies to be found when no one is specifically looking for them. In the wilderness, unless it's somewhere like on Mount Everest where bodies are naturally preserved by freezing, corpses tend to disappear pretty quickly. Predators are not 100% effective, but scavengers are pretty close, especially because there's so damned many of them ranging from insects to worms to birds and mammals.
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.
Of course, for that you have to tell people about your immediate plan. If you simply "disappear", this will likely trigger a very expensive rescue expedition that will find your freshly dead corpse, and it will ruin your Viking funeral.
Wills are generally executed long after the body is dealt with. Probate can take years and a body needs to be handled almost immediately.
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.
Now 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.
There 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.
Fascinating. 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.
I 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."
Yes, 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.
Yeah, 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.
Disposing 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.
The 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?
> 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 don't know about the Japanese, but in Europe where this practice was common (certainly in London) one answer is simply that they tolerated more outbreaks of infectious disease.
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.
Having 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.
Trophic layers are a decent reason why. Apex predators of all sorts tend to collect pollutants for little energy gain.
If you let say crows feed upon human flesh that is perfectly fine since they can't really prey upon humans but if you let say big cats, bears, wolves or wild dogs feed upon them they start to view humans a food source and can get it - although not without heavy consequences. Maneaters usually have teeth so bad that they essentially go for humans as their equivalent of "soft foods" despite the danger we are as frankly comparably abominations even by standards of apex predators.
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.
I 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.
> 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.
Here 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.
Space 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.
> 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?
The article gives only the most passing nod towards cremation: is cremation a more environmentally sound option? How are cadavers donated to science disposed of?
There 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.
> How are cadavers donated to science disposed of?
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.
That 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.
> 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.
One of the cooler things to do with your corpse I ran across over the years is to end up at a body farm [1]. Helps the CSI types learn new forensics science!
My 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.
I 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.
"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?
They 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.
the 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.
It'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.
Fair 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.
The 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.
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.