What’s the ecological cost of contemporary burial?
Each year in the U.S.’s 22,500 cemeteries we bury roughly: 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid 90,272 tons of steel (caskets) 2,700 tons of copper and bronze (caskets) 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete (vaults) 14,000 tons of steel (vaults) 30-plus million board feet of hardwoods (much tropical; caskets) Emissions and pesticide use: Though we haven’t found good figures for emissions (from lawn mowing, trimming, etc.) or synthetic pesticide and fertilizer use, it’s got to be mega-tons each year. (Depending on the type of mower used, cutting grass for one hour emits as much pollution as driving a car from 100 to 650 miles.) The average cemetery buries 1,000 gallons of embalming fluid, 97.5 tons of steel, 2,028 tons of concrete, and 56,250 board feet of high quality wood in just one acre of green. The ecological cost of cremation: Each cremation releases between .8 and 5.9 grams of mercury as bodies are burned. This amounts to somewhere between 1,000 and 7,800 pounds of mercury each ye
