How Much Does a Cremation Cost? Depends Who You Call
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How on earth can incinerating a human body require $1000 worth of consumables, even factoring in the pay for the operator and other employees?
This Freakonomics episode goes into more detail: http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/14/the-troubled-cremation-of...
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.
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.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25189315-smoke-gets-in-yo...
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-...
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.
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...