In a 1986 survey of one hundred students at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Dayton and Columbia University nearly two-thirds of the respondents expressed the desire to be cremated at death, and the overwhelming majority wished their ashes to be scattered in some reunion with nature.   But is cremation really good for the earth?   What about all the CO₂, CO, smoke?   What about all the gas used up?

When they burn you up lots dust, soot, ash and other unburned particles from the you and your casket will be given off.   But actually you'll burn cleaner than a burger, look at these figures for pounds of unburnt particles her hour:

Wood Stove	0.46 lbs/hr
Restaurant Cooking 100 burgers/hr	0.18 lbs/hr
Diesel Truck	0.14 lbs/hr
Cremation with casket/container	0.08 lbs/hr

According to science writer Hannah Holmes: "Well the Federal government has so many sources of dust that they want to address, to reduce the amount of dust that we all breathe, that they've had to go examine every industry and see where they should start to have the biggest impact.   Evidently cremation is not it.   They compared the dust and gas production of a crematorium with the dust and gas production of a fireplace, and the fireplace was far, far dustier and gassier, and they decided to leave the crematories for another day."

Modern cremation equipment has been developed to produce nice clean output.   In the cremation equipment produced by H. R. Heinicke flue gases from your cremation are chilled by flowing through the flue gas heat exchanger.   Next your gaseous remains go through a cyclone filter which works by using the force of gravity separate out your larger dust particles.   The gas leaves the cyclone and is led to the bag filter.   The bags usually have shaker arms that are used when the bags need to be cleaned.   So some your dust will be collected at the bottom of the bag house and then thrown away.

If you don't combust fully you'll produce Carbon Monoxide (CO).   CO reduces the ability of blood to deliver oxygen to the cardiovascular and nervous system.   Long-term exposure can cause brain damage.   But look at the figures (PPM = parts per million):

Diesel Truck	22 PPM
Wood Stove	3.5 PPM
Cremation with casket/container	0.06 PPM

This young woman may do less damage to the planet when the crematorium consumes her, than she is warming herself by a log fire!

Sure when you are cremated you will produce the green house gas Carbon Dioxide. But think out much of your life already produces masses of CO₂ from...

• The gasolene in your car.
• The aviation fuel when you fly for your vacation.
• The gas or oil based heating that keeps you warm in the long winter.
• The bonfires and candles you light.
• The breweries and bakeries that make your beer and bread.
• Your living breathing lungs.

Perhaps the once only Carbon Dioxide from your incineration is not so bad after all.   After all you will feed get to the plants.

You are 3% nitrogen and 0.25% sulphur.   The nitrogen in your body, together with the nitrogen in the air which is fed into the cremation furnace to keep you burning, forms nitrogen oxides.   In the cremation process your sulphur produces sulphur oxides.   The gas to fuel your cremation may also contain sulphur.

Environmental affects of sulphur and nitrogen oxides include the formation of smog and acid rain.   Acid rain can cause damage to trees, lakes and property.

The health affects of nitrogen and sulphur oxides are respiratory illnesses and lung disease.

But is cremation the worst offender?

While your cremation will give off 0.3 pounds of nitrogen oxide per hour....

• A restaurant grill gives off 0.48 pounds of nitrogen oxide per hour.
• An idling truck produces 0.12 pounds of nitrogen oxide per hour.

And the big offenders when comes to sulphur oxides are coal fired power stations.

Dioxins are formed during the combustion process when chlorinated products such as plastic are burned.   These plastics may be present as prosthetics or as part of the casket.   Your body also contains a percentage of chlorine and thus your cremation will produce dioxin.

Damage to the liver, kidney and digestive tract are affects of dioxin-like compounds.   Cancer, miscarriage, and birth defects are also possible at higher than average concentrations.

But the good news for us all - but especially for pregnant mums - is that "Crematoria are certainly not of high relevance for the total emission of PCDD/F in Europe.   In this connection the data from crematoria up to now indicate that in most cases these installations may be disregarded." (European Dioxin Inventory - Results)

The formation of dioxins during your cremation can be avoided by:

• Not incinerating chlorinated plastics with you - so as good as you look in them, you can't be cremated in your PVC trousers.
• Cremating you at a high enough temperature.
• Making sure the gases from your incineration move through the system properly.

At the intense temperatures of cremation the mercury in your fillings will become vapor.   Breathing in mercury is not good news, once present in the body it immediately and continually affects the kidneys.

Exposure to the metal is also linked to damage to the brain, nervous system and fertility.   Crematoria responsible are for 16% of the UK's mercury pollution.   Your cremation could add up to 6 grams of Mercury to the total.

"Removing teeth with fillings would be the easiest solution" said Bill Stanley, a spokesman for the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management in Scotland.

But you need not make your final journey all gums.   Wet scrubbers can be used to tackle mercury pollution.   In the wet scrubber the gas exiting the cremator is sprayed with water to remove as many air pollutants as possible from the stream.   The droplets containing the pollutants gather at the bottom of the wet scrubber and are drained out.   The water stream is then taken to a holding tank where the heavy particles settle out.   The water can then be reused in the scrubber.   Alternatively, selenium filters from Majic Systems Ltd can remove 94% of the mercury.

Furthermore, many elderly people have dentures and with improved dental health people are having fewer fillings - so the next generation may be less polluting.

Want to look your best for the big burn? Prepared to have a strange guy to make a 1 inch cut in your lower neck, insert a tube into your main artery, drain your blood and pump embalming fluid into you?   Perhaps embalming is for you.   But doesn't all that embalming fluid (Formaldehyde) cause pollution as you burn?   No, exposed to cremation temperatures, Formaldehyde reacts with oxygen and breaks down into carbon dioxide and water.   Formaldehyde emissions from the stack are just about nonexistent in cremation.

The smoke and gases from a crematorium will will cause an increased cancer rate over 70 years of one in 100,000 persons.

The annual lung cancer death rate from cigarettes amongst men is the USA is 306 in 100,000 smokers (86 per 100,000 for the population as whole).

Today I've already taken over an hour off my life, and as I light up and breath in deeply I come another 11 minutes closer to be turned into water vapor, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen and sulphur oxides.

And cremation heat can be used ... The heat from the furnaces of the two crematoria in Helsingborg and Boras in Sweden is being piped directly to district energy companies. One local energy company heats 60,000 homes and estimates the crematoria have supplied about 10 percent of its needs.   The policy has vehement opposition.   Hey what's the fuss?   Personally I'd like to be recycled.

But cremation may be possible without any fossil fuels at all.   One contributor on the infamous Half Bakery site suggests a solar crematorium.   It is made up by a big parabolic mirror to catch the sun, a pyrex glass cage with a slate of meltproof material such as tental carbide, and a solarcell panel that produces electricity to split oxygen and hydrogen in water.   The hydrogen is used to fuel the hearses.

The oxygen is fed to the glass cage and the concentrated sunlight reflected from the parabolic mirror incinerates you at a temperature that far exceeds what can be reached in a furnace or even with an acetylene cutting torch (3000 degrees C).   The added oxygen insures a you have a very clean and complete burn.   If you have an artificial hip or pacemaker, even they will burn in the atmosphere of pure oxygen.   You will leave very little ash behind - at 3000 degrees your bones will burn.   Once loaded into the pyrex cage you won't last long: 15 - 30 minutes with a clear sky.

The sun is the ultimate source of power for the earth and each and every source of power, including the gas used in crematoria.   The solar powered crematorium cuts out the middle man.   The ideal way to go for a sun worshipper.

But isn't this just another half baked idea?   Not at all.   A Swiss national, Wolfgang Scheffler, is helping Indians build the world's first solar energy-powered crematorium in western Gujarat state in a bid to save firewood and be ecologically-friendly.   It will take two to three hours to reduce a body to ashes.   A 50-square metre glass and steel solar dish will reflect the sun's rays on to a specially constructed coffin.   The crematorium would have a dual-fuel arrangement.   When clouds shroud the sun, there is the option of an electric furnace.

Cremation does provide a very quick way of being recycled back into Nature.   As one 1911 encyclopedia says of the carbon dioxide produced from a cremation:
"...[it is] transferred through the medium of the atmosphere to become converted into vegetable growth of some kind — trees, crops, garden produce, grass, ∓mp;c.   Every plant absorbs these gases by its leaves, each one of which is provided with hundreds of stomata — open mouths — by which they fix or utilize the carbon to form woody fibre"
I like the idea of feeding the little mouths of hundreds of plants.

Eternal Reefs, Inc., will turn your ashes into a living coral reef.   Eternal Reefs mixes your cremains into concrete to create artificial reef modules, made to last 500 years or more, which are placed in locations around the world where the reef could use a little help.   Once the modules are put in place, they're there to stay, creating new habitats for sea life.   So your ashes can help the fishes.   Friends and relatives can be present when the module is being cast and when it is placed in the sea.   Great for Pisceans.

It is possible to melt down and recycle artificial hips, knees, plates, and pins after they have been separated from cremation ashes.   Such schemes are already used in Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, Germany and Holland, and some are planned for the UK (Liverpool Echo).   Cremation damages the surface of the metal parts, so immediate re-use is not an option.   However, most orthopedic implants are made of cobalt steel, which is in short supply.   Therefore, most of the metal is eventually re-made into new orthopedic parts.   But if you are buried, the metal from your orthopedic implant is effectively thrown away.

Parhaps cremation isn't a great polluter compared to other human activities.   But isn't burial much cleaner?   What can be more natural than to rot down?   No pollutants at all.   Just ask this guy.

The view in this picture might be good, but the outlook for cemeteries isn't so hot.   Cemeteries take up a lot of space.   In Europe, Japan, and other densely populated areas of the world, the lack of cemetery space is a major problem.   Ashes in an urn take up a lot less space than a body in a coffin.   The urns can be stored in columbaria, with one niche per urn.   A columbarium in Hong Kong contains, within its 18,500 square meters, a Chinese garden, a cable car terminal, a five-tiered pagoda and 28 memorial halls which can house a total of 43,000 cremated remains.   The same number of burial plots, laid side by side with no spaces in between, would take up an area of 127,000 square meters.

But there have been attempts to solve the cemetery space problem....

Recycling of graves is one solution.   So if you want to rest in peace, it will not be for very long.   In England exhumation is becoming a big business in some areas where limited land areas are creating a demand from developers for more space.   Exhumations and reburials in England have reached record levels of 40,000 per year.   In Thiais, a suburb of Paris, the poor deceased are afforded space for a maximum of six years after which time the communal ossuary receives their remains. Small chimneys are inserted into each burial space to facilitate rapid decomposition.

In other places cemeteries are building upwards.   Crypts in New Orleans (USA) often contain five or six levels for bodies. Similar crypts in Mexico and France contain as many levels below ground as above.

Even if there is enough space to bury, the herbicides and petrol mowers routinely used in cemeteries, often over long periods of time, impact the environment.   There is, of course, one environmentally friendly grass cutter.

Embaling is more likely to be carried out if a body is buried.   As has already been mentioned, embalming involves the extraction of about three litres of blood and bodily fluids.   This blood and fluid is then drained directly into the sewerage system. In many places, most of it ends up in the oceans.   In Australia, in 1996, almost 113,000 litres of blood and bodily fluids were drained into the sewerage system.   Swimming in dead men's blood, not a nice thought at the seaside.

Burial has the most potential to pollute waterways, especially through the contamination of groundwater.   Water that percolates through cemeteries will carry with it some elements of the interred remains, which may then be dispersed throughout the environment.   This means that chemical preservatives in the corpse (from embalming) can contaminate groundwater when the bodies decompose.

Preservatives (formaldehyde and methyl alcohol)	Change the nature of the body’s cell proteins so they will not putrefy
Germicides	Kill bacteria
Dyes	To colour tissue
Humectants	Help retain moisture in the tissue.
Anticoagulants	Prevent blood clotting.
Surfactants	Allow fluid to pass through small blood vessels.
Water Conditioners	Purify water used to dilute embalming fluid.
Perfuming Agents	Mask smell of chemicals being used.
Chemical Vehicles	Allow various chemicals to mix together.

The early pioneers of cremation stressed its public health benefits: "Complete disinfection takes place by means of the high temperature to which the body is exposed"   Recently, Boyd Dent has argued that bacteria and viruses may be transported from cemeteries in groundwater.   Dent says that although conventional wisdom teaches that disease organisms in bodies become an insignificant matter with time, Anthrax spores have survived in bone buried in soil for about 200 years, inactive smallpox has survived at least 150 years in a coffin, and recent work on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome has considered of the survival of viruses outside the body.   Can we expose ourselves and our children to risks when disease organisms could be quickly incinerated?

According to Derek Wong (Wong's Virology) "When death of a person suffering from a notifiable infectious disease takes place .... cremation is the safest method of disposal and relatives should be encouraged to agree to this method although it cannot be legally enforced."   With the arrival of new infectious diseases it seams wrong that cremation cannot be enforced.

So to prevent infection this young lady should be cremated - shoes, fishnets and all.

Maybe you prefer cremation anyway - on religious grounds, because you don't like the thought of rotting, or because you want go out in a burst of flame - then there is no need to have an environmental guilt trip about your wishes, as I hope this page has demonstrated:

• Compared with other human activities cremation's impact on the environment is relatively benign.
• Cremation technology is becoming ever cleaner.   An enormous effort has been made to ensure your incineration produces as few pollutants as possible.  Even mercury can now be filtered out.

But if you want to make your final exit in the most environmentally friendly way?   Cremation has some air pollution consequences, burial some water pollution effects.   We are at least fairly clear about the effects of cremation on the atmosphere, but the "pollutant effects of burial on water supplies is generally unresearched" (Boston Borough Council).   Furthermore, cremation really saves land for the living.   So for me cremation is most environmentally friendly.   But hey I'm biased, I want to burn, and I want you to burn.

What do you think of this page?   Helpful information?   A useful summary?   Too boring?   Too many facts and figures?   A balanced treatment?   An attempt to justify the enviromentally unsustainable practise of cremation?   Perhaps you think good looking women add a touch of glamour to a less than exciting topic, but maybe you think there is a dangerous association of death with erotocism?   Whatever you think give me some feedback

It is good to see school and College students researching pages on cremation and burial.   You can't think about your final destination too early.

• "Bury or Burn" by Sherman Wong of Sydney Grammar School was a useful source on water pollution.   The page is no longer online but I can post you the original.
• Terese Gregg, Morgana Bach, Elizabeth O'Brien, Heather Fitzpatrick while studying at the university of Florida produced information about cremation emissions. Their Pollutants, Regulations, and Air Pollution Control pages are still online.
• Information on the 1986 Survey of Attitudes to Cremation, reuse of graves and building cemeteries upwards comes from a PhD thesis by Mark Evan Bazzell

Besides these pages there are a range of online resources:

• Hannah Holmes discusses dust in The Religion Report.
• Information about H. R. Heinicke's cremation equipment can be found at their projects page
• The chemical composition of the human body
• IEE engineering produced large amounts of data on emissions including Nitrogen and Sulphur Oxides.   Since becoming part of the Matthews Group this material is no longer on the web site, but again I can mail you a copy.

• Gordon McLeod provided Nicola with a number of "Cremation University" materials used in training crematory technicians.   I have used "Formaldehyde in the cremation process" and "Emissions from cremation equipment" in preparing this page and will happily e-mail these one page PDFs to anyone interested.
• Deadly Power Plants discusses Sulphur and Nitrogen Oxide emission from power plants.
• Antaries provides information on Nitrogen Oxide emissions from trucks.
• European Dioxin Inventory Results discusses the emission of dioxins from cremations.
• Information on the problem of Mercury fillings in cremation can be found at BBC News, Sunday Times, Metro Active, Miltec and the Summary of responses to crematoria mercury consultation
• Estimates of cancer rates from crematoria are from Metro Active.   Lung cancer death rates from Smoking Causes
• Dead Swedes provide home heating gives details of the use of energy from some Swedish Crematoria for home heating.
• Reports on the Indian Solar Crematorium are from Indian Express
• Boyd Dent discusses the survival of diseases in a buried body.
• The 1911 Encyclopedia gives some of the original reasons for cremation.