Archive for the ‘Eco-Death’ Category
Burial Goes Vertical
8, Dec 2009Aussie Undertakers Turn Funeral Business on Its Head… by Offering to Bury People Upright Foreign News Service, Daily Mail Online (December 7, 2009) Just when you thought there were enough options for final disposition, a company in Melbourne, Australia, invents a trolley that will cart around a corpse then deposit it vertically with minimal blunder [...]
- By: Meg Holle
- In: Burial|Eco-Death
- Tags: green burial, vertical burial
Putting Death Down the Drain
2, Dec 2009Dying to Be Green? Try “Bio-Cremation” Nicole Mordant, Reuters (December 1, 2009) There’s a shiny new final disposition in town, attempting to gain ground on the green burial bandwagon: Resomation, developed in Scotland in 2007, also known as bio-cremation or the dreadfully ambiguous “Water Resolution.” Cremation is consistently flogged for its high energy consumption and [...]
- By: Meg Holle
- In: Cremation|Eco-Death
- Tags: bio-cremation
How Dead Bodies Become Beetle Juice
10, Oct 2009To Casket Or Not To Casket? One Of America’s Great Field Biologists Thinks About Burial Robert Krulwich, NPR (October 9, 2009) NPR science reporter Robert Krulwich (also of RadioLab fame) did this short piece (it’s a little over five minutes long) on the decomposition of dead animal bodies and their consumption by beetles. He interviews [...]
- By: John
- In: Burial|Death + Biology|Eco-Death
- Tags: coffins, decomposition, green burial
Death That Chills
6, Oct 2009Public Funeral Parlor Recycles Energy from Cremations for Air Conditioners Mo Yan-chih, Taipei Times (October 7, 2009) Last August John wrote about crematoriums in England capturing the heat generated during cremations and recycling it to warm the building. The Taipei Second Funeral Parlor in Taiwan is taking a similar approach, this time transforming the heat [...]
- By: Meg Holle
- In: Cremation|Death Ethics|Eco-Death
Save a Mango Tree: Incinerate Amma in Cow Dung
29, Sep 2009Cow Dung Cremations Catch On in Bihar Amarnath Tewary, BBC News (September 27, 2009) Ongoing floods and a subsequent depletion of mango trees, the traditional cremation fuel for the people of Bihar, India, has led to the use of cow dung in funeral pyres. Readily available and culturally acceptable (coming from a sacred animal, and [...]
- By: Meg Holle
- In: Cremation|Death Ethics|Eco-Death
- Tags: green burial