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Comment by omgtehlion | Hacker News Reader

It is all good. But I suppose we have more garbage problems to solve.

Recently I finished house renovation and paid (not a small sum) to dispose of almost 3 metric tons of "cunstruction garbage". It contains metals, rocks, different finishes, detergents, fire retardants, plastics, glass, stained wood, paints with whatewer inside...

So in my lifetime I will produce ~70kg of corpse garbage + coffin etc, and compare this to 3000kg. Well I do not know what is more dangerous... Add to this usual daily household garbage, which is not sorted and recycled 100%, I find body disposal not the most pressing problem.

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Unlike other waste, we position cemeteries (relatively) close to where people live because they want to visit, so it has a larger impact on people.

Not sure why this article shits on cremation though, the greenhouse gases emitted seem truly minor.

Also construction waste is a debatable one. Sure it's not good stuff, but did you produce it? Or did you just move it? I'm sure, at least....i hope, whatever you replaced it with in the house is better for the occupants than the materials you removed.

> but did you produce it?

Well, I paid for it to be produced. If I would not commission this, less paints and other chemicals would be required. Less coal would be burnt to produce cement used to create concrete.

Yep, that makes sense. At least garbage is moved far away, so it’s someone else’s problem.

Re cremation: I have heard, that to reduce a body to nice ashes takes a lot of heat and requires too much natural gas or whatever they burn in your local crematorium. Bodies do not vurn by themselves, and if you use just enough fuel to set it on fire, you’ll get bad smelling and bad looking coal-like substance covering bones...

That alkaline reduction seems ok though.

Cremation puts 540 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere; the average human breathing puts out 2.3 pounds of CO2, so it's basically the same as breathing for an extra 234 days.

Or being an American for ~3 days.

We have far larger fish to fry.

This is the way we "deal" with most problems. We say "butwhatabout" [insert something else here], which is a great excuse to do nothing. It's callet "whataboutism" and will quite likely eradicate humanity within the next hundred years or so, as we destroy our planet, all the while saying "butwhatabout" and pointing fingers.

On the other hand, we have "feel good solutions" like banning plastic straws, so people can pat themselves on the back for helping to solve the problems.

My favourite is soy / almond milk etc.

If you don’t drink milk, why do you need a substitute? A substitute that comes in difficult to recycle aluminium-paper-plastic laminated cartons that still contain most of the food-miles and process / handling carbon emissions.

Ok, hipocricy is everywhere and we can’t all be angels over night.

Those aren't called milk because they're a substitute for anything, they're called milk because that's the English word for a cloudy translucent liquid. See also milk glass, milk thistle, and milk of magnesia.

Speaking for myself, I drink almond milk because it tastes better than cow milk.

Usually, they want a substitute because they like foods that taste roughly like milk but they can’t drink milk. Is that too much to ask?

but none of the vegetable "milks" taste anywhere close to mammalian milk.

No? I haven’t tried almond milk, but rice milk tastes similar.

But what else would you put on your corn flakes?

So? Skim milk tastes nothing like full fat milk, but still has a right to exist.

It's something sorta similar to milk that can be used in roughly the same applications - lighten coffee, moisten cereal, baking, sauces, fold into mashed potatoes, etc.

I prefer the taste of pretty much all nut milks to cows milk, personally.

Most people drink soy/almond milk because they like the taste, or because their bodies aren't very good at digesting lactose.

Allergies to casein are also becoming much more common.

I don't know anyone who drinks non-dairy milks for concerns over carbon emissions. It's always been one of or a mix of dietary concerns, taste preference, or avoidance of the awful dairy industry.

Also, where I live, dairy comes in those tetrapaks, too.

Also known as "something-ism".

1. We must do something!

2. Banning straws is something!

3. We did it!!

My favorite is wearing ribbons for a cause.

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