I temped in a sales office for a cremation company a number of years ago and it was a very interesting experience.
You can pre-buy cremations and issued a legally binding document which states that you are to be cremated. This can save your family the trouble and heartache of shopping around for a good deal as well as debate/drama over what to do with your remains. From what I understand, it is also easy to be upsold on burial packages when you're grieving so pre-buying basically locks in the price and helps prevent guilty feelings for not buying the top of the line casket.
>>> pre-buying basically locks in the price and helps prevent guilty feelings for not buying the top of the line casket.
It's also a great time for old people to commit their families to expensive and unnecessarily elaborate funerals. I know of one woman who was sold a "storage" plan because she wanted her funeral to happen "in the summer". It took a lawsuit to void that illegal contract. These deals also cause difficulties when people die while travelling. Rather than cremating them locally and transporting ashes, I've seen ridiculous clauses for the funeral home to send people to collect and return the body. Whenever a business targets old people, assume shady dealing.
Free advice: Never make a funeral home a beneficiary to a will. Pre-buy only for fixed costs. Do not commit to anything without an absolute fixed price. Never give a funeral home any access to your accounts no matter how often they claim doing so will make things "simpler" after your death. And talk to your kids about the finances. Funerals are not fun. Fancy flowers cannot change that. Nobody who cares will remember them.
> You can pre-buy cremations and issued a legally binding document which states that you are to be cremated.
Even if your next of kin disagree and want a traditional burial for your body? People can be assholes and disregard your final wishes if they think their upholding some kind of tradition/religious principle.
My great grandma died at 94. She prepaid her entire funeral, bought the plot, picked out the dress she was to be buried in, and prepaid for everyone to eat afterwards (not sure how that part worked out but she did).
I understand that the choice/decision to cremate the self is personal. But I think it stops where the personal starts affecting us all. Is cremation that negligible of an issue for the environment?
Compared to the energy you will use throughout your life, the energy used for a cremation is trivial (about a 5,000 mile drive).
The alternative (burial) impacts the environment considerably as well. There is plenty of land devoted to cemeteries. Trees or metal are used (once) for the casket. In many places, you also need a concrete vault, which would add to the impact.
How is it not biodegradable? It's mostly carbon and calcium, right? In which case it's as natural as it can be - saying it's not biodegradable is like saying that rocks are not biodegradable. You could probably use it as a fertilizer(not that you would want to, respect towards the deceased and all that) and it would be absolutely fine. Cemetery land is essentially locked for hundreds of years, probably more since no one wants to be turning 500-year old graves into farmland.
> probably more since no one wants to be turning 500-year old graves into farmland.
In Manhattan, the place that is now Washington Square Park was once the location of mass graves for people who died of yellow fever during an epidemic. Before that, it was used as farmland.
That said, this is far from the norm in the US - New York is one of the few places where this could happen, due to the scarcity of space, and it's also unclear whether people remembered the locations of the graves at the time the park was constructed.
Rocks aren't biodegradable. There are buildings in Rome with basements made of Roman concrete.
Cemetery land gets reused all of the time. In my city, the main park (1890) and high school (1970) were both built on cemetery land. The land gets seized by eminent domain or purchase, bodies exhumed and rebutted elsewhere.
>When growing on mineral surfaces, some lichens slowly decompose their substrate by chemically degrading and physically disrupting the minerals, contributing to the process of weathering by which rocks are gradually turned into soil. While this contribution to weathering is usually benign, it can cause problems for artificial stone structures. For example, there is an ongoing lichen growth problem on Mount Rushmore National Memorial that requires the employment of mountain-climbing conservators to clean the monument.
and
>The lichen exudates, which have powerful chelating capacity, the widespread occurrence of mineral neoformation, particularly metal oxalates, together with the characteristics of weathered substrates, all confirm the significance of lichens as chemical weathering agents.[96]
It's believed lichen may be as old as 2.7 billion years, so they may have beat out every other form of biodegradation by a good margin.
In terms of geologic process, sure. But a concrete cemetery vault is going to remain right where it is, in it's present form for thousands of years.
Near where I live, there are boulders that were dragged down a valley by retreating glaciers 10,000 years ago. They've been exposed to the elements for that time, are are materially intact.
I am wondering what is your definition of biodegradable then. I would argue that cremation is the ultimate form of biodegradation of the body, since it has been reduced to something that cannot be reduced any further - you end up with some carbon and calcium, which is what you would end up anyway - that's what we are made out of in the end.
That time is a century or more. The US national cemetery (Arlington) is nearly full. Even after 150 year nobody would dare suggest reusing even the oldest plots.
Full decomposition ends up putting the same minerals into the soil that your ash contains. So the ash is already just as "biodegraded" as the body ends up, just mixed it in to soil.
Does cremation really use the energy equivalent of 100-200 gallons of gasoline? That seems like a huge amount, considering a typical human body has maybe 20 gallons of flesh.
If you don't want to be cremated or buried, there are these "natural death"[0] places that will perform woodland burials for you. It's pretty cool. You are buried out on a meadow somewhere in a biodegradable coffin without being embalmed and with a tree over you.
Not advocating banning cremations or anything. Just found that cool.
I heard in a TED talk that you can now buy a "mushroom suit" that acts as a substrate and is laced with nutrient so that you grow mushrooms when buried.
This isn't legal in many jurisdictions. When done correctly I'm sure it is perfectly safe and dignified. But we have rules about the disposal of bodies for a reason. Not everyone appreciates people turning meadows into their personal burial grounds.
There are some serious questions being asked about natural burials and pharmaceuticals. Dead bodies these days are cocktails of drugs, synthetic body parts (knee/hip replacements) even radionuclides. Whether the mushroom suit can deal with all of that properly remains an open question.
It's legal in virtually all jurisdictions, provided the proper steps are followed to organize as a cemetery, comply with laws, coordinate with funeral directors etc.
Basic principles of no embalming, no vault, simple coffin or shroud, are more or less identical to Jewish and Muslim practices, practiced in every state.
Moreover there are no ecological concerns versus conventional burial, except that conventional burial typically involves sticking a lot of concrete, steel, and treated wood in the ground. Whereas natural burial uses fewer resources and conserves land in a natural state.
Embalming does nothing regarding drugs or radionucleotides in the body. It simply adds embalming fluid consisting mostly of formaldehyde that decomposes after burial. Removing implants may or may not be done for both conventional and "natural" burial, no difference; it's always done for cremation since incineration is involved.
The "mushroom suit" innovation is not a common green burial practice at this time.
Yes. It's an involved process that might even require the purchase of the property and setting up your own personal cemetery. If you are inside a city and require rezoning then you better get started long before you expect to die. Low impact, but certainly not low cost. And all sorts of places (parks, crown land etc) where ashes are allowed remain off limits.
Burying in a coffin requires wood and precious land space. What else do you propose? Burial at sea? A boat that would take your body there would also burn oil.
I mean, there's a million more wasteful things that you can complain about, other than how we dispose of our bodies after death.
Is that worse than drinking liquefied shit? Because that's also going into the waste treatment plant, and in far larger quantities than even large-scale corpse disposal would produce.
Every molecule of H20 you've every drunk has been part of a disgusting biological process at some point. But homeopathy isn't real; the water doesn't remember.
Yes, or more precisely, wastewater treatment plants can neutralize most fecal-borne pathogens, but they are unable to neutralize prions, the infectious agent behind transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). In fact, in some cases, prions even remained infectious after incineration at 600°C [1].
[1] Brown, Paul, et al. "New studies on the heat resistance of hamster-adapted scrapie agent: threshold survival after ashing at 600°C suggests an inorganic template of replication." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97.7 (2000): 3418-3421.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Edward_Rau/publication/...
It's environmental paralysis. Perhaps we'd consume less energy rotting in place. If you died in the office, you'd get bonus karma for shutting the office down, reducing carbon emissions from commuting.
India, who's Hindu population require cremation as a death rite, and really needs to worry about deforestation, has been investigating direct focused solar cremations, ("Huge two parabolas of 32 m2 concentrate solar radiation"[1]). I always thought that might be an interesting way to do it, particularly if one's body could be placed so that you vaporize at sun-rise.
I"ve seen some of that "cremation" by the Ganges river. They were not spreading the ashes on the river so much as dumping rather large blocks of cooked flesh. Ash shouldn't make a splashing noise. The practice needs to be modernized.
"Last week more than 80 bodies – mostly decomposed skeletons and half-burned corpses – surfaced in the river in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh after a drop in water levels. "
That's such a neat idea. I'm imagining a Stonehenge like ring of mirror towers with a central platform in the middle at the focus. What an awesome ceremony it would be. "From stardust we all came to the star we return our loved one..."
it's almost certainly better than embalming, and the energy cremation uses is in readier supply than the land traditional burial uses, so i'd guess it's a net win over most methods. "green burial" would be better, but it's not common.
I comparison shopped for my grandmother's cremation a decade ago. I think she would have appreciated the effort.
She had already purchased a cemetery slot, so the only question was how to transport her ashes there. The low bidder sent a hearse about 100 miles to get her body, and was easy to deal with on the phone (and took credit cards).
My parents are part owners of a funeral home. The hearse is only ceremonial, e.g., for bringing a casket from the funeral ceremony to the cemetery. At least in their locale, most funeral homes do not even own their own hearse, but rent one as needed.
For picking up bodies, like from the hospital or whatever, they've got a regular van.
Even more troubling, in the Internet age, funeral parlors tend to make pricing hard to find. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission allows funeral homes to keep their rates hidden until someone actually writes or calls a funeral home representative -- leaning on regulations last updated in 1994 -- rather than pushing funeral homes to let the customer compare online.
How about a company where you can subscribe to get such prices? The company runs something like a call center where software gives employees assignments to periodically inquire about prices, which are then posted to the database? This would cover prices for more than just cremations, of course.
I think the chapters are all locally run. I went to a local meeting when my mom had terminal cancer. They had a list of local funeral homes with guaranteed prices, and had some agreement with FCA to honor the prices.
Years back, there was a cremation place in Georgia that had its cremation machine break. It was too expensive to fix so the guy just kept accepting bodies. He would drive them to his property and just dump them. It was a pretty huge case.
"Between 1996 and the date of the discovery, more than 2,000 bodies had been sent to Tri-State. The search ultimately recovered 339 uncremated bodies. Of the 339 bodies that were discovered, 226 were identified."
How long did they expect to keep that up? I could conceive of them doing it for maybe a year and then buying a machine but it seems that, at least to them, it became business as usual.
At first, they claimed that some bodies had been improperly stored as they were awaiting repairs to the retort.
Then, when the scope of the issue became known, I wondered the same thing. How long did they think they could keep stacking bodies without anyone noticing them?
I saw a presentation on it done by one of the officials who did the cleanup (he was actually the same guy in charge of body recovery in Kosovo death camps, brought in because Tristate was so grisly) . He explained that the guy who ran the place was slow (mentally handicapped) ... He came from a good family, who ran the facility responsibly until the father died and he took over. . He wasn't a creep or a cheat, just was not mentally equipped to handle the responsibility.
Almost all the funerals I've been to, the person is cremated. I had this strange experience when this past summer when my buddy died and his body was placed into a mausoleum. Later on when we were back in the area (LA), my other friend asked me if I wanted to go back to his mausoleum to see him. I never understood the desire to go back to those places, its almost if one is not wanting to let go of the death that took place.
Somewhat topical story: A co-worker was part of a jogging group (this was in Virginia, USA), and one of their members died after a fight with cancer. He wanted his ashes to be spread in the Botanical Gardens, where they ran.
But said Botanical Gardens had rules denying this (don't recall if it was hygiene, environmental, or just not wanting to open the door to piles of ash).
So the group somberly gathered, took his ashes, divvied them up among a collection of plastic bags, poked some holes, and went for their normal jog around the park.
At the end the bags had only bits of bone too big to fit through the holes left. (Turns out cremation doesn't result in ONLY ash).
I haven't decided if this was a triumph of individual respect over bureaucracy, or a blatant disregard for the commons.
(1) Prep the body by cutting out anything that will harm the cremator, specifically pacemakers with potentially explosive batteries.
(2) Fire.
(3) Sift through the ashes/bones for any metal (hips/metal screws)
(4) Macerate remaining bits into homogeneous ash.
They do look similar to gravel/sand. And something that was surprising to me (although probably shouldn't have been) is that the weight of the remains definitely differs depending on the size of the person.
One of my close friends died nearly three years ago, and his family and I spread his ashes in a national forest... possibly illegally, I'm not really sure.
I've returned to the spot a few times. I can still find his ashes! They weren't spread out very much when we first dumped them, though I've spread them out a little since, so some mountain flowers can grow among him. His ashes form an odd cement-like sand. I'm glad our national forests aren't littered with ash piles, but I am glad that I can come back and find my friend. I wonder how long I'll be able to find Nick's ash pile.
It sounds bittersweet. More bitter. I'm happy you're glad. I am replying because I'd get into depression if I lose my close friend and thought you might appreciate a reply, but really I don't know what to say.
I spread my brother's ashes in a National Forest. It's illegal but so are a lot of things. We placed them on a large rock outcropping that meant something to our family, around 10,000 ft of elevation looking out over the fruited plains of this country at the height of summer, on his birthday.
A violent storm came that night as we camped below the outcropping, lashing wind and hail and lightning upon our piteous insignificance until eventually heading to lower climes down the mountain slope. The next dawn was glorious in its vibrance and clarity.
One problem that can cause price differences is obesity. 2/3rs of Americans are overweight or obese, and it is much more difficult, expensive, and potentially dangerous, to cremate a person who has a bodyfat percentage of 40% or more.
Funeral Homes should only have to post rates for people with body fat percentages of 25 and below. And they should be allowed to charge more for the fat. Otherwise families of people who were not obese would be subsidizing obese lifestyle choices.
Semi-related, it's hard to imagine being defrauded out of cremation remains, but it's apparently quite likely to happen during pet cremations (due to the cost to run the machines, multiple smaller pets are processed at the same time and you won't necessarily get back what you sent).
> And the lower range cremation prices are likely to attract additional business. They are loss leaders. "If it's under $1000, they're probably losing money. You really don't make much profit on the direct cremation alone," Jung says. "They're just trying to get you into the door."
How on earth can incinerating a human body require $1000 worth of consumables, even factoring in the pay for the operator and other employees?
If anyone is interested in working on this, I am connected with an "industry veteran" (has owned dozens of funeral homes and similar institutions across the country) working on an "Uber of cremations". My email is in my profile.
This seems strange. While I think price transparency is good, I'm not quite sure what incentive a funeral home would have in participating since essentially it would be a race to zero.
82 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadYou can pre-buy cremations and issued a legally binding document which states that you are to be cremated. This can save your family the trouble and heartache of shopping around for a good deal as well as debate/drama over what to do with your remains. From what I understand, it is also easy to be upsold on burial packages when you're grieving so pre-buying basically locks in the price and helps prevent guilty feelings for not buying the top of the line casket.
It's also a great time for old people to commit their families to expensive and unnecessarily elaborate funerals. I know of one woman who was sold a "storage" plan because she wanted her funeral to happen "in the summer". It took a lawsuit to void that illegal contract. These deals also cause difficulties when people die while travelling. Rather than cremating them locally and transporting ashes, I've seen ridiculous clauses for the funeral home to send people to collect and return the body. Whenever a business targets old people, assume shady dealing.
Free advice: Never make a funeral home a beneficiary to a will. Pre-buy only for fixed costs. Do not commit to anything without an absolute fixed price. Never give a funeral home any access to your accounts no matter how often they claim doing so will make things "simpler" after your death. And talk to your kids about the finances. Funerals are not fun. Fancy flowers cannot change that. Nobody who cares will remember them.
Even if your next of kin disagree and want a traditional burial for your body? People can be assholes and disregard your final wishes if they think their upholding some kind of tradition/religious principle.
The alternative (burial) impacts the environment considerably as well. There is plenty of land devoted to cemeteries. Trees or metal are used (once) for the casket. In many places, you also need a concrete vault, which would add to the impact.
That's exactly what I'd want my ashes used for.
In Manhattan, the place that is now Washington Square Park was once the location of mass graves for people who died of yellow fever during an epidemic. Before that, it was used as farmland.
That said, this is far from the norm in the US - New York is one of the few places where this could happen, due to the scarcity of space, and it's also unclear whether people remembered the locations of the graves at the time the park was constructed.
Cemetery land gets reused all of the time. In my city, the main park (1890) and high school (1970) were both built on cemetery land. The land gets seized by eminent domain or purchase, bodies exhumed and rebutted elsewhere.
I'm sorry, but what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichen
>When growing on mineral surfaces, some lichens slowly decompose their substrate by chemically degrading and physically disrupting the minerals, contributing to the process of weathering by which rocks are gradually turned into soil. While this contribution to weathering is usually benign, it can cause problems for artificial stone structures. For example, there is an ongoing lichen growth problem on Mount Rushmore National Memorial that requires the employment of mountain-climbing conservators to clean the monument.
and
>The lichen exudates, which have powerful chelating capacity, the widespread occurrence of mineral neoformation, particularly metal oxalates, together with the characteristics of weathered substrates, all confirm the significance of lichens as chemical weathering agents.[96]
It's believed lichen may be as old as 2.7 billion years, so they may have beat out every other form of biodegradation by a good margin.
Near where I live, there are boulders that were dragged down a valley by retreating glaciers 10,000 years ago. They've been exposed to the elements for that time, are are materially intact.
That time is a century or more. The US national cemetery (Arlington) is nearly full. Even after 150 year nobody would dare suggest reusing even the oldest plots.
Most US car owners drive at most 10,000 miles a year. A half year's driving? That's only a trivial energy use by 1st and 0th world standards.
Human composting seems like a good idea to me: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/science/a-project-to-turn-...
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
This page says it's equivalent to a 500 mile drive, which is much more believable: http://www.naturaldeath.org.uk/index.php?page=cremation
Not advocating banning cremations or anything. Just found that cool.
0: http://www.naturaldeath.org.uk/
There are some serious questions being asked about natural burials and pharmaceuticals. Dead bodies these days are cocktails of drugs, synthetic body parts (knee/hip replacements) even radionuclides. Whether the mushroom suit can deal with all of that properly remains an open question.
Basic principles of no embalming, no vault, simple coffin or shroud, are more or less identical to Jewish and Muslim practices, practiced in every state.
Moreover there are no ecological concerns versus conventional burial, except that conventional burial typically involves sticking a lot of concrete, steel, and treated wood in the ground. Whereas natural burial uses fewer resources and conserves land in a natural state.
Embalming does nothing regarding drugs or radionucleotides in the body. It simply adds embalming fluid consisting mostly of formaldehyde that decomposes after burial. Removing implants may or may not be done for both conventional and "natural" burial, no difference; it's always done for cremation since incineration is involved.
The "mushroom suit" innovation is not a common green burial practice at this time.
Someone else has a spare field, and they get the necessary permissions.
It's just a normal graveyard, but not attached to any religious building, with no or minimal headstones, and lots of trees and native local flowers.
It's just a business.
I mean, there's a million more wasteful things that you can complain about, other than how we dispose of our bodies after death.
I for one don't want to drink liquefied brains.
Eventually bodies make it to the ground, which then eventually make it to the air...
Soylent 1.5, that was just before they switched to algal oil.
I wonder what Soylent 3.0 will be made of?
Every molecule of H20 you've every drunk has been part of a disgusting biological process at some point. But homeopathy isn't real; the water doesn't remember.
Yes, or more precisely, wastewater treatment plants can neutralize most fecal-borne pathogens, but they are unable to neutralize prions, the infectious agent behind transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). In fact, in some cases, prions even remained infectious after incineration at 600°C [1].
[1] Brown, Paul, et al. "New studies on the heat resistance of hamster-adapted scrapie agent: threshold survival after ashing at 600°C suggests an inorganic template of replication." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97.7 (2000): 3418-3421. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Edward_Rau/publication/...
Hey, you're way smarter than me, so if you are on board with the idea I'll give it a go! Lets eat our dead! xD
[1] http://www.tss-india.com/crematorium
[2] http://www.solarthermalworld.org/content/india-first-solar-c...
[3] PDF feasibility study: http://rsisinternational.org/Issue4/01-09.pdf
"Last week more than 80 bodies – mostly decomposed skeletons and half-burned corpses – surfaced in the river in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh after a drop in water levels. "
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/19/hindu-bodies-ga...
She had already purchased a cemetery slot, so the only question was how to transport her ashes there. The low bidder sent a hearse about 100 miles to get her body, and was easy to deal with on the phone (and took credit cards).
For picking up bodies, like from the hospital or whatever, they've got a regular van.
How about a company where you can subscribe to get such prices? The company runs something like a call center where software gives employees assignments to periodically inquire about prices, which are then posted to the database? This would cover prices for more than just cremations, of course.
"This post is adapted from the blog of Parting, a Priceonomics customer."
From http://www.parting.com:
"Find trusted funeral homes near you to compare quality and prices"
But that's the only new publisher business model that seems to work these days.
I think the chapters are all locally run. I went to a local meeting when my mom had terminal cancer. They had a list of local funeral homes with guaranteed prices, and had some agreement with FCA to honor the prices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-State_Crematory
How long did they expect to keep that up? I could conceive of them doing it for maybe a year and then buying a machine but it seems that, at least to them, it became business as usual.
At first, they claimed that some bodies had been improperly stored as they were awaiting repairs to the retort.
Then, when the scope of the issue became known, I wondered the same thing. How long did they think they could keep stacking bodies without anyone noticing them?
I don't believe they ever thought that far ahead.
But said Botanical Gardens had rules denying this (don't recall if it was hygiene, environmental, or just not wanting to open the door to piles of ash).
So the group somberly gathered, took his ashes, divvied them up among a collection of plastic bags, poked some holes, and went for their normal jog around the park.
At the end the bags had only bits of bone too big to fit through the holes left. (Turns out cremation doesn't result in ONLY ash).
I haven't decided if this was a triumph of individual respect over bureaucracy, or a blatant disregard for the commons.
You actually end up with large, intact bones after cremation. They actually take the bones and grind them up into finer particles.
I've never seen cremation, ashes, but I've been told they look similar to gravel.
(1) Prep the body by cutting out anything that will harm the cremator, specifically pacemakers with potentially explosive batteries. (2) Fire. (3) Sift through the ashes/bones for any metal (hips/metal screws) (4) Macerate remaining bits into homogeneous ash.
They're mildly interesting. They're great if you have someone who fiddles around with stuff on your desk and doesn't stop when asked.
"What's this?"
"My dead dad's knee. That dust? That's my dead dad."
I've returned to the spot a few times. I can still find his ashes! They weren't spread out very much when we first dumped them, though I've spread them out a little since, so some mountain flowers can grow among him. His ashes form an odd cement-like sand. I'm glad our national forests aren't littered with ash piles, but I am glad that I can come back and find my friend. I wonder how long I'll be able to find Nick's ash pile.
A violent storm came that night as we camped below the outcropping, lashing wind and hail and lightning upon our piteous insignificance until eventually heading to lower climes down the mountain slope. The next dawn was glorious in its vibrance and clarity.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25189315-smoke-gets-in-yo...
See http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/520833/Cremation-obese-5...
Funeral Homes should only have to post rates for people with body fat percentages of 25 and below. And they should be allowed to charge more for the fat. Otherwise families of people who were not obese would be subsidizing obese lifestyle choices.
This Freakonomics episode goes into more detail: http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/14/the-troubled-cremation-of...
How on earth can incinerating a human body require $1000 worth of consumables, even factoring in the pay for the operator and other employees?
Why would anyone need to "take a look". We don't have room for all the bodies and internment has (always?) been more expensive than cremation.