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How Much Does a Cremation Cost? Depends Who You Call

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Re: How Much Does a Cremation Cost? Depends Who You Call

#71

Post by nommm-nommm »

stcredzero wrote: post #17
cpwright wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to the energy you will use throughout your life, the energy used for a cremation is trivial (about a 5,000 mile drive). 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.

Compared to the energy you will use throughout your life, the energy used for a cremation is trivial (about a 5,000 mile drive). 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-...

The average american drives 13,476 miles a year. 16,550 for males and 10,142 for women.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm

Re: How Much Does a Cremation Cost? Depends Who You Call

#72

Post by nokcha »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #53
outworlder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Down the drain? As in, the city's waste treatment plant? I for one don't want to drink liquefied brains.

Is that worse than drinking liquefied shit? Because that's also going into the waste treatment plant, and in far larger quantities than even large-scale corpse disposal would produce. 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.

>Is that worse than drinking liquefied shit?

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/...

Re: How Much Does a Cremation Cost? Depends Who You Call

#73

Post by sandworm101 »

DanBC wrote: post #57
sandworm101 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't legal in many jurisdictions. When done correctly I'm sure it is perfectly safe and dignified. But we have rules about the disposal of bodies for a reason. Not everyone appreciates people turning meadows into their personal burial grounds. 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 repl…

You don't just go and find a field and dig a big deep hole. 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.

Yes. It's an involved process that might even require the purchase of the property and setting up your own personal cemetery. If you are inside a city and require rezoning then you better get started long before you expect to die. Low impact, but certainly not low cost. And all sorts of places (parks, crown land etc) where ashes are allowed remain off limits.

Re: How Much Does a Cremation Cost? Depends Who You Call

#74

Post by CWuestefeld »

dankohn1 wrote: post #52
mixmastamyk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is a hearse needed to transport (presumably an urn of) ashes?

Hearse to transport the body to the crematorium. The ashes were put in a styrofoam box.

My parents are part owners of a funeral home. The hearse is only ceremonial, e.g., for bringing a casket from the funeral ceremony to the cemetery. At least in their locale, most funeral homes do not even own their own hearse, but rent one as needed.

For picking up bodies, like from the hospital or whatever, they've got a regular van.

Re: How Much Does a Cremation Cost? Depends Who You Call

#75

Post by wavefunction »

ergothus wrote: post #27

Somewhat topical story: A co-worker was part of a jogging group (this was in Virginia, USA), and one of their members died after a fight with cancer. He wanted his ashes to be spread in the Botanical Gardens, where they ran. 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 a…

I spread my brother's ashes in a National Forest. It's illegal but so are a lot of things. We placed them on a large rock outcropping that meant something to our family, around 10,000 ft of elevation looking out over the fruited plains of this country at the height of summer, on his birthday.

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.

Re: How Much Does a Cremation Cost? Depends Who You Call

#76

Post by mattstreet »

jjoe wrote: post #8
cpwright wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to the energy you will use throughout your life, the energy used for a cremation is trivial (about a 5,000 mile drive). 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.

But the resulting ash isn't biodegradable. Cemetery land can be reused after full decomposition and after enough time has passed.

Full decomposition ends up putting the same minerals into the soil that your ash contains. So the ash is already just as "biodegraded" as the body ends up, just mixed it in to soil.

Re: How Much Does a Cremation Cost? Depends Who You Call

#78

Post by zanny »

WalterBright wrote: post #69
nsxwolf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just liquify bodies with chemicals and then flush them down the drain?

Why has nobody mentioned making soylent green yet? :)

Of course the creator of D wants to eat liquefied dead people.

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

Re: How Much Does a Cremation Cost? Depends Who You Call

#79

Post by pixl97 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #63
gambiting wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it not biodegradable? It's mostly carbon and calcium, right? In which case it's as natural as it can be - saying it's not biodegradable is like saying that rocks are not biodegradable. You could probably use it as a fertilizer(not that you would want to, respect towards the deceased and all that) and it would be absolutely fine. Cemetery land is essentially locked for hundreds of years, probably more since no…

Rocks aren't biodegradable. There are buildings in Rome with basements made of Roman concrete. 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.

>Rocks aren't biodegradable.

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.

Re: How Much Does a Cremation Cost? Depends Who You Call

#80

Post by DanBC »

sandworm101 wrote: post #73
DanBC wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't just go and find a field and dig a big deep hole. 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.

Yes. It's an involved process that might even require the purchase of the property and setting up your own personal cemetery. If you are inside a city and require rezoning then you better get started long before you expect to die. Low impact, but certainly not low cost. And all sorts of places (parks, crown land etc) where ashes are allowed remain off limits.

You're still not getting it.

It's just a business.

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