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Comment by _red | Hacker News Reader

This is totally anecdotal, but we have a family friend who is an undertaker in a small town. He claims bodies today rot at a slower rate then when he started in the 50's. His theory is that its the preservatives in food.

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The changes in sensing time while growing old are said to work in the other direction, so he might be on to something. :)

Also, the moisture level in the soil might have changed.

Or the funeral homes got better at selling varnished coffins instead of pine boxes.

And at selling embalming as a standard and expected part of the process. For the UK at least:

- Varnished coffins are usually very thin veneer on top of mainly particle board - the glue is as problematic as any varnish, and add pollution to cremation. US coffins are commonly steel(!) apparently. "Brass" fittings are usually plastic, and not removed before cremation as you might expect.

- Embalming is so much an expected part you're not asked, it's just done. You'd have to already know it's not required and you may ask for no embalming. In former years it was common to have the coffin at home for a few days - with no embalming. Not that long ago either.

- Mind boggling amounts of formaldehyde (and other chemicals) are used by the funeral industry.

Source: Going too far down this rabbit hole and ultimately choosing a natural green funeral for me.

Burial in a wicker coffin in a forest somewhere has always appealed more to me than all these chemicals. I want to feed worms and trees after I die, not pollute the earth even more.

Pop out anything that someone else might be able to use and chuck me in the compost bin

That's pretty much what we settled on, and for similar reasons. In time, just see forest, sometimes with flat local stone or wood plaques, without bleak rows of cemetery headstones. Far more uplifting and not even more expensive, surprisingly. Not as surprising was burial in managed woodland is a fairly common option when we looked into it, some planting a native tree in place of headstone.

Needless to say once we dug into how it's usually done, we found yet another industry that's become horribly eco unfriendly.

I have to wonder how toxic the human body is. I have read that bioamplification of pesticides and heavy metals can be a problem for fish and birds. A quick google only shows me vague possibilities when reviewing humans. Is it worse for us because we're bigger and long lived, or does processed food avoid that sort of problem?

We're an apex predator, so should receive all the amplification effects seen travelling up a food chain. Course having accumulated toxins, it depends what you do with them afterwards. Natural decomposition tends to spread it back to the bacteria, fungi and small animals at the very base of the food chain again.

Burn the body in a gas furnace for a few hours and release loads of ugly things. Including all the artificial fibres, coffin glues and plastics, and any fillings, implants etc. Mercury amalgam fillings can get to surrounding animals, even into fish off the coast. From memory something like 20% of uk atmospheric dioxins are from cremation.

If burying, the formaldehyde and other embalming chemicals leech into the ground along with any accumulated toxins in the body, and can prevent proper decomposition for decades or more. Embalming that's completely unnecessary for the timescale of most burials. Mostly those chemicals are ugly, and little studied when put in the ground in scale. Yet are studied when added in small amounts as fire retardants or glues in furniture etc. Then you have the US using steel coffins in concrete lined graves!

It's quite the ugly rabbit hole once you descend and start looking into burial and cremation.

Throw me off a boat out at sea, wrapped in canvas. I'm good.

Also appealing. The problem with it is that at some point, a canvas wrapped body is going to wash ashore somewhere and people will want to know where it came from. Victim of an accident? A murder?

Edit: maybe weigh it down. That would work. And by "it" I mean yourself, I guess.

And please, skip the shoes. People have been wigged out for years around these parts, since shoes with the foot still inside have kept washing up on shore.

I think the consensus was that it was suicides or other drowning victims, not some nefarious plot, but people get twitchy.

Viking funeral pyre for me.

This story is making round a lot. I usually file it in the urban legends folder.

I legit laughed at that. Morbid humor.

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