Bob CollinsBy today’s standards of what to do with dead people, dying is really bad for the environment. Chemicals used in embalming, for example, eventually leach into the earth. Cremation pollutes the air (about 500 pounds of carbon dioxide), and there’s the whole use of greenhouse gasses thing to consider.
Why not just flush us down the town sewer?
The CBC reports that an Ontario company has come up with a new way to handle the dead. It dissolves human remains and flushes the fluid.
This is what it’s come to as the “green wave” sweeps through the funeral industry.
“It brings your body back to its natural state,” Dale Hilton, owner of Aquagreen Dispositions, says. “It’s the same way as being buried in the ground, but instead of taking 15, 20 years to disintegrate, it does it in a quicker process. And it’s all environmentally friendly.”
It all depends on how environmentally friendly you want your demise to be.
“It could be a problem,” the manager of the local sewage treatment plant says. “We haven’t experienced that yet. I don’t know how many bodies they’d have to do in a day for that to be a problem,” he said.
After the process is done, about 8 pounds of powder is left; that’s given to the families. The rest sleeps with the fishes.
