Thanks to those of you that are still with me on this sometimes unpleasant subject of burials. As I said in yesterday’s blog, I originally intended for this to only be two blogs, but there is just so much information out there, I felt compelled to write a third segment.
If you are not so hip on a green cemetery and are still considering cremation, you might want to take a look at resomation, sometimes referred to as bio-cremation. Not many states have legalized it so far, but rather than burning the body, they put the remains in a stainless steel tank filled with water and potassium hydroxide. That is heated for several hours until the remains melt. Okay, now I am grossing myself out writing about this.
Anyhow, the family can request that some of the remains be put in a urn while the rest is just recycled through the sewer system. That’s right, you get flushed. If you are wondering just how environmentally safe this is, Sehee says that they can “flush” more than 100 pounds of human residue and still be safe.
Another interesting thing I learned from Tom Jokinen, author of “Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaking-in-Training” was that you can make your own casket. The funeral home can require you to have a casket (and for an interesting reason – bodies buried without caskets tend to cause the earth to sink and caskets help them keep the land level for mowing), but they cannot force you to buy one of theirs. However, if you plan to make one, you want to do it beforehand and then it is a little creepy to explain to friends why you have a wooden casket just sitting in your garage.
Green burial and green cemeteries are still in an infancy stage. The Green Burial Council was created in the mid-2000’s as a way to try to lend some standards to the growing industry. So, if you are considering green burial, shop around and make sure you are going with a company that is truly green. Much like many green products, some cemeteries may market themselves as green just to get your dollars.
This all was certainly food for thought for me and one thing is for sure, people are always dying and eventually, we are going to run out of land to bury them in traditionally.