The True Cost Of Traditional Burial

There has been something of a hiatus of late as far as my posting on The Bone Idol is concerned. Time has certainly been a limiting factor recently. However, there has been no shortage of ideas and there are plenty of topics which warrant some expatiation. It is a cliche I know, nevertheless the spirit is willing but the flesh is week. I am also conscious that, to a casual observer, The Bone Idol might appear a little preoccupied with sepulchral matters. This was not necessarily how I saw it developing when I started out and I would like to try to steer it away from them somewhat, but I’ll make no promises. Indeed, since I was thinking about the environmental impact of the funeral industry a week or so ago and was considering greener alternatives to traditional burials and cremations, I came across the following statistics which were compiled by a certain Mary Woodsen who is, apparently, the vice president of the Pre-Posthumous Society of Ithaca, New York and a science writer at Cornell University.

According to Woodsen, every year American corpses are prepared for the grave using 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid, which includes formaldehyde. This is enough to fill nearly four Olympic-sized swimming pools! Some 180,544,000 pounds of steel and 5,400,000 pounds of cooper and bronze are incorporated in their coffins. As far as the wood is concerned, 30 million board feet of hardwoods, including tropical woods are either buried or cremated and a staggering 3,272,000,000 pounds of reinforced concrete and 28,000,000 pounds of steel go into their vaults.

These statistics are mind-boggling in their enormity – they refer to materials which are used by the funeral industry during just one year and in the USA alone! I cannot imagine what these statistics would be if they were for the whole world.

Bone Idle