Save the planet, don’t die

New “green” funerals are becoming the ‘way to go’ across the US. One reason is the massive wastage involved in conventional funerals. There are 23,000 cemeteries in America that bury nearly a million gallons of toxic embalming fluid every year.

The caskets add up to 91,000 tons of steel, 2,800 tons of bronze and copper, and the hardwood in the coffins ad’s up to 33 million board feet. New burial vaults use one and three quarter million tons of concrete and fifteen thousand tons of steel.

The amount of wood used for caskets each year could build forty large houses, and the concrete used for memorials would add a swimming pool for each of those houses.

The EPS considers casket manufacturers to be one of the fifty ‘most wanted’ hazardous waste producers in the continental US. They use a multitude of hazardous chemicals including xylene and methy.

The amount of natural gas used to cremate human bodies each year would send 85 rockets to the moon and back.

The EPA says there is a growing body (their word, not ours) of evidence that cremations cause emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, as well as hydrogen fluoride, mercury, hydrogen chloride and a multitude of other lethal toxins.

Cremations in the US account for 0.02% of global dioxin emissions.