Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of pollutants | Hacker News Reader

Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of pollutants

atlasobscura.com

140 pointsbasicplus2138 comments

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.

I'm always surprised how few identified Superfund sites there are.

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.

Could you explain what a superfund site is?

> "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."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund

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.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Mine

Anywhere that Max Gergel worked:

"Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide?"

https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/indices/book...

The Gergel mess was small and in no way comparable to the PCB mess in the Hudson or the Love Canal site in Buffalo.

Chemophobiacs may remember Edward Tyczkowski, featured here in a breathless Salon article: https://www.salon.com/2004/03/23/armageddon/

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.

Nice, i am surprised to see Professional Mechanic's to hang out on HN.

There's at least one other Merchant Mariner (I used to be one), and I'm (now) an Air Traffic Controller.

I'm sure there's a bunch of other fields represented here.

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.

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.

My favourite is soy / almond milk etc.

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.

Usually, they want a substitute because they like foods that taste roughly like milk but they can’t drink milk. Is that too much to ask?

but none of the vegetable "milks" taste anywhere close to mammalian milk.

No? I haven’t tried almond milk, but rice milk tastes similar.

But what else would you put on your corn flakes?

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.

Most people drink soy/almond milk because they like the taste, or because their bodies aren't very good at digesting lactose.

Allergies to casein are also becoming much more common.

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.

Also known as "something-ism".

1. We must do something!

2. Banning straws is something!

3. We did it!!

My favorite is wearing ribbons for a cause.

Unlike other waste, we position cemeteries (relatively) close to where people live because they want to visit, so it has a larger impact on people.

Not sure why this article shits on cremation though, the greenhouse gases emitted seem truly minor.

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.

> but did you produce it?

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.

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...

That alkaline reduction seems ok though.

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.

Or being an American for ~3 days.

We have far larger fish to fry.

One of the proposed linked options is the Mushroom Death Suit from TED 2016. Sounds good to me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7rS_d1fiUc

That left me with a peaceful sense of my own mortality. I was not expecting that this afternoon, thank you for sharing.

Human composting is also an option:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRsopS7yTG8

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:

https://www.wired.com/2016/10/inside-machine-will-turn-corps...

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(element)#Releases_in_...

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.

Personally I would go for a sky burial but I doubt it would scale.

Edit: to be honest, just for myself, I don't think I would want it for any loved one.

The number of carrion feeders scales with the number of available corpses so...

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.

In theory if tombstones are to last forever, the whole world would eventually become graveyards.

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.

> Graveyards are hardly subsidized

How much in land taxes do they pay?

“Permanent” tombstones are often limited to 30 years. It’s probable I will lay in my grand parents cemetery, but probably not alongside them.

If there’s a 30 year limit, why are tombstones that are >30yrs still standing in most cases?

One of the oldest cemeteries in my town has dates going as far back as mid-1800s and I don’t think they go through periodically and dig bodies up.

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.

They won't bother unless they start running out of space.

I ran those numbers: 51.08 million square miles / (4 ft * 8 ft) = 44.5 trillion.

Estimates are for 100 billion humans have ever lived, plus (currently) 255 human births per minute (and falling) = 331,017 years

Well hopefully we're space faring by then!

Burial at C it is then.

Home, home on Lagrange...

“Asking” means it probably won’t happen. You need to put it in a will.

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.

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.

I'm going with this method when I eventually die.

I want a Viking funeral myself.

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.

That sounds like a great idea....unless you are the poor person who stumbles upon the decomposing corpse.

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.

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.

Rare is not the same as won’t. Save some folks some potential trauma.

Fair point.

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.

Do you have any more information about this? Surely there must be some pretty strict rules on where the "forest or similar area" is?

I kind of wanted to be shot into deep space, but eaten by worms seems more apt.

I would recommend the Ask A Mortician YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/OrderoftheGoodDeath

It's extremely informative and promotes a natural look at death and the necessary arrangements you can make.

Or sign up for cryonics and try not dying in the first place.

Great way to piss away your estate for no reason.

It’s not like you can spend it on anything else at that point.

If the odds are 1%, or 0.01%, it’s still personally worthwhile.

...assuming you never had children?

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.

There is this thing called life insurance which nearly all cryonicists use to fund their suspension and storage.

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.

If you're wiling to take Pascal's wager like that, you could just practice a religion for free.

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.

Good points. Can you go into more detail about “not every set of religious beliefs is equally probable”?

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).

You are misinformed. Cryonics is largely paid through life insurance.

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.

I'd go for Diogenes of Sinope's request of what to do with his body after death:

To be left outside with a stout stick, so my corpse can either be eaten by dogs, or fight them off should it find this upsetting.

That is funny, my only instruction is to dispose of me in such a way that those who cared about me can be close to the grave.

To me a headstone or other grave marking is a way to help those who grieve the loss.

Can you explain why you don't want one?

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."

Now I'm spooked.

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 what's the deal with these massive plush caskets. it's being lowered gentry into the ground, not dropped from an airplane.

Also, the occupant is dead.

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.

It’s usually cemeteries that require vaults and caskets not the government.

A cynic in me thinks that if you wake up in the middle of being lowered into the ground, you won't be heard and rescued.

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial

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.

How did the Japanese do it with night soil then? Did they burn it before using it as fertilizer?

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.

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.

If I recall correctly the BSE outbreak was due to using brains in feed.

I agree with your general point about extra genuine health concerns.

> feeding [components of] cows to other cows.

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.

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 customer gets to have their body float through space for millennia. Cool!

We are floating through space. In a huge spacecraft called earth. Aren't we?

Ha imagine the distant civilization who has to deal with a storm of alien corpses raining down on them

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?

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.

1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cremation...

Why would the environmental cost of cremation be higher than of burying? The required land for a cemetery alone has a huge environmental cost.

I said it was hard to measure, not that the cost is greater. I don't know if it is or isn't.

> 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.

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.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/business/flameless-cremat...

I wonder what would be the downside of dumping them in the ocean or deep bodies of water and letting the fish go at them.

The same as described in the article, you’re just shifting it from land to sea.

> How are cadavers donated to science disposed of?

In the UK, by incineration.

[0] https://www.ciwm-journal.co.uk/downloads/Healthcare-Waste-WE...

> 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.

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!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_farm

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.

Oops. :)

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.

Why do graveyards exist? Do they provide any value? Do they generate profit at least?

I'm trying to grasp how society continues having them aside from a religious standpoint.

> Do they provide any value?

Yes. In fact, they provide "invaluable" emotional value.

> Do they generate profit at least?

Some do, after all they are like any other low margin business.

same reason golf courses exist

"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.

Did you read the article? Human bodies are full of toxic compounds nowadays

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.

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.

Maybe not more toxic, but more of a biohazard due to human-specific viruses and bacteria.

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.

Or be used directly as Soylent Green.

Please someone think of our future anthropologists? For them, cremation is not the answer.

What are they going to learn that they wouldn't learn from our literature?

Well, I happen to think an anthropologist would be just fine. They'd say, “Oh! They cremated themselves then.”

Fine fine. I get it. Let's just limit my comment to genetic anthropologists and those who like to study bones.

That wouldn't do, it'd be discriminatory—anthropologistist even.

I disagree, though I'm no anthropologistist apologist.

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