Grave Matters

Over time, the typical ten-acre swatch of cemetery ground, for example, contains enough coffin wood to construct more than forty houses, nine hundred-plus tons of casket steel, and another twenty thousand tons of vault concrete.  To that add a volume of formallin sufficient to fill a small backyard swimming pool and untold gallons of pesticide and weed killer to keep the gravehard preternaturally green.

That is from the really quite interesting Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial, by Mark Harris.  As you may have guessed, the book is a plea for eco-friendly burials.  As for me, I would like my body to be disposed of at a profit, though I doubt if we will have seen enough sectoral deregulation by then…