
Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of pollutants - basicplus2
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cemetery-soil-human-remains
======
nimbius
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.

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

~~~
mousadafousa
Could you explain what a superfund site is?

~~~
bsder
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...](https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/indices/book_856.html)

~~~
HarryHirsch
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/](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.

------
omgtehlion
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.

~~~
Eridrus
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.

~~~
omgtehlion
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.

~~~
Eridrus
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.

------
shironineja
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7rS_d1fiUc)

~~~
shironineja
Human composting is also an option:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRsopS7yTG8](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...](https://www.wired.com/2016/10/inside-machine-will-turn-corpse-
compost/)

~~~
zeroname
> 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_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_\(element\)#Releases_in_the_environment)

------
Beltiras
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.

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

~~~
hannasanarion
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.

~~~
ryacko
“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.

~~~
Alex3917
> Graveyards are hardly subsidized

How much in land taxes do they pay?

------
rustcharm
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.

~~~
hyperpape
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.

------
andrew_
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.

~~~
creep
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.

~~~
village-idiot
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.

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

~~~
notduncansmith
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.

~~~
ars
> 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.

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

------
jedberg
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.

~~~
Nasrudith
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.

~~~
zeroname
> 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?

------
Invictus0
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?

~~~
creep
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cremation_rate)

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

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

------
dwyerm
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. :)

------
pankajdoharey
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.

------
ckdarby
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.

~~~
claudiawerner
"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?

------
adreamingsoul
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.

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

~~~
MertsA
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.

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

~~~
MertsA
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.

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

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

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

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

~~~
notduncansmith
I disagree, though I'm no anthropologistist apologist.

