Washington state is now allowing human composting - real story, real new laws. Some company is looking into doing it for people - experiments showed it takes about 6 weeks to compost a human, leaving the bones.

They obviously didn't even bother to read the extremely detailed article.. WTF...

@Channeler1 @maturin1919 The link was read, but was not clear specifically what is toxic or wasteful about burial, from the poster's perspective.

It depends on your point of reference. Formaldehyde is a naturally occuring organic compound. It's in the ground anyway, albeit burying bodies would increase its concentration.

It's like saying asbestos is toxic, but that too is part of nature. Everything toxic is part of nature.

As for wasteful, again what is the point of reference. Yes it it may use a wooden casket, but the act of growing a tree and burying it will, for some years, sequester carbon. This can be a benefit.

Particularly as while the trees is growing, it will have absorbed energy from the sun that it would not otherwise have done, before it's chopped down. There is an argument that not growing trees is wasting the sun's energy.

Don't forget, no one grows trees for the sake of growing trees. There has to be a commercial drive. If there was no demand for caskets, then fewer trees would be grown.

It could be argued that be better to bury directly. Perhaps. But I don't see where burial.in a wooden casket is adverse to the environment to the extent detailed in the article.

@maturin1919 Everything is made of "chemicals". Metals are mines from the ground anyway. Plastics are carbon based organic molecules that was once lived underground as oil anyway.

I do agree that the whole funeral industry is one big ornate plan to make money.

But not any more than Christmas, valentine's Day, or any other modern commercial offering. How much energy is wasted, for example, growing Christmas trees only to be chopped down and binned.

That's my point, that the funeral industry is not that wasteful versus simply living in the modern day.

As for growing trees, whatever environmentally conscious people do will not so much as make a scratch in the scheme of things, because the the cost of land grow enough trees to really be able to make a dent would require a concerted effort from billionaires and governments. There is no appetite for this, because options such as carbon capture and storage provide a better bang per buck, and much quicker than a trees can grow.

The best that we can do is stop cutting down wild forests, sustainably manage existing ones. If there is no enough demand for wood from the latter, then the land will be used for some other productive commercial purpose that may not be as green.

@maturin1919 I agree entirely, that it all needs to be reigned in. We all need to go back to being at one with the environment. As stated in Carl Sagan's 'Billions and Billions', there was a time when humans, with primitive technology, couldn't harm the environment with the energy of our own paltry bodies.

But then industrialization came, and the earth rapidly lost out.

My personal view is that our current standards of living, including how many humans are alive, long we live, and what we consume, is fundamentally at odds with the earth. Something has to give.

The issue is that the decline of the earth is too slow for people or Governments to care. But Darwin will rule, and the disease of the earth, which is humans, will be dealt with in time by man-made forces such as climate change.