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…
too funny.
kj, all good ideas, I was thinking of making it a media event as well…
At a profit? The Ferengi have it all worked out.
Honestly, I would just prefer to be taken to the nearest zoo, and fed to the the carnivores, but only after I am dead.
I can imagine a system where people auction their dead bodies to the highest bidder while they are still alive (has anyone tried this on e-bay already?), but I’d feel unsure walking around knowing there is a price on my head…after all, people respond to incentives!
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