Liquefaction. It’s billed as a greener alternative to cremation, resulting in a third less greenhouse gas emission, uses far less energy, and prevents emission of mercury vapour from dental fillings. Amazingly, cremation is thought to account for 16% of airborne mercury in the UK, so it’s a genuine problem. Pretty sensible stuff, wonder if it will catch on. Cremation itself was seen as controversial a century ago.
I’m afraid to click that link.
I think I heard that being buried in only a shroud and no casket is fairly green. I think I’ll still opt for cremation, though. No mercury fillings here, composite only.
I would think the most environmentally friendly thing to do (other than not being born at all) would be wrap me in a sheet, weigh me down and dump me in the ocean, where the fishies would eat me all up.
How about Explodification? I’d blow up real good.
But the whole point of cremation is that your body goes up into the sky. With liquefaction, it goes down the drain. I don’t think this would be very popular.
As for the mercury vapor issue, why can’t they just pull any teeth with fillings before cremation?
sky burial is green and feeds the birds.
The link is perfectly safe btw, it’s a BBC news article.
Yes, I can see that putting a lot of people off, but not everyone cares about such things. Think of it as joining the great water cycle. As I said above, at one time there was a lot of resistance to the practise of cremation, despite unbelievable overcrowding in city cemeteries. The Catholic Church only approved the practice in 1963. It’s not inconceivable that it could become common.
Could be done, but is kind of ghoulish and has unfortunate connotations. At the moment, crematoriums are spending a lot of money installing filtration systems.
Points for style, but kind of messy. I wouldn’t want to forget my umbrella at your funeral.
I’d forgotten about sky burial. Kind of cool, but not practical in a city. The London pigeons are already fat enough.
I prefer the other method mentioned in the same article
Sits better with me than being flushed like a goldfish!
These still all seem really energy-intensive methods to me.
Also, with the ‘promession’ method, the body is reduced to freeze dried powder, put in a box and buried in a shallow grave - won’t the powder be rehydrated by environmental moisture and then rot and stink (which is a problem in a shallow grave).
I know if I shallowly buried a big box of blood, fish and bone meal (I assume this is of approximately similar composition) in my garden, I’d have a problem fairly soon.
You’re supposed to compost! Your dear widow will get some lovely roses the following year!
I’m gonna go with the “strand me on an ice floe when I’m too old to be useful”. Because that will solve the whole “polar bears starving from global warming” problem.
(My only issue with this solution is that my boss may decide that “too old to be useful” is “any time now”.)
Despite rumors of lots of my Dad’s family winding up in the ash heaps of Auschwitz (we actually don’t know for sure what happened to them - after 1939 those who had not left Europe already simply disappeared, fate forever unknown), my family now routinely practices cremation as opposed to burial and wouldn’t have an issue with fillings being removed for safety/environmental reasons.
In other words, a lot of people can get over the ew factor. Granted, some never will, but I don’t require that a better method be universally adopted. I’m happy if just a portion of folks move in that direction.
I am in favor of the “Giant meat grinder, then used for farm fertilizer” method that I just invented in my head.
Grind Me Up!
Plow Me Down!
Just don’t die.
Or you could become a reef.
I’m already a beetch.
Yes - or a woodchipper directed over the stern of a boat out at sea - give something back to the fishes.
And the eulogy – “He was my best chum”.
I just don’t want to be paralyzed while the larvae of a giant ichneumon wasp eat their way out of my abdomen…
I don’t know how environmentally friendly it is, but I want to be plastinated when I die.
Asses to Basses, chunks go plunk