Well, being green has no end...even in the end.
Nina Shen Rastogi of Slate.Com gives us some useful information on what is the most green way when it comes to getting rid of, well,
you.
Traditional burials are highly resource-intensive. There are coffins to manufacture and ship—sometimes across very long distances, if you choose an exotic wood like mahogany—and concrete vaults to build. (Many cemeteries require coffins to be placed within bunkerlike structures to prevent their neatly manicured grounds from collapsing.) In a
Slate article from 2006, the founder of the Green Burial Council estimated that Americans bury more metal each year than was used to make the Golden Gate Bridge and enough concrete to build a two-lane highway from New York to Detroit.
The embalming fluid used to keep corpses looking perky is another ecological bête noire. More than
800,000 gallons of the stuff are interred in Mother Earth annually, most of it containing carcinogenic
formaldehyde. Finally, burying your bones 6 feet deep means that your corpse will decompose without the benefit of oxygen. Instead of producing carbon dioxide and water, as your remains would if they were buried in topsoil, your body will sludge-ify and begin leaking out methane—a greenhouse gas that, as the Green Lantern has
pointed out before, is 21 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.
Many people who choose cremation do so because it seems like the tidier choice: less muss, less fuss. If you have your ashes scattered or kept in an urn, you won't be taking up valuable land space. Going without a gravesite also means you cut out the emissions and fuel consumption associated with regular visits from mourners.
But crematories don't run on lollipops and puppy dog tails—most use a combination of natural gas and electricity to incinerate their occupants. One leading manufacturer told the Green Lantern that a typical machine requires about 2,000 cubic feet of natural gas and 4 kilowatt-hours of electricity per body. That means the average cremation produces about 250 pounds of CO2 equivalent, or about as much as a typical American home generates in six days.
Along with energy consumption, mercury emissions from vaporized dental fillings are the other commonly cited concern. Since the EPA doesn't monitor crematoriums, reliable data are hard to come by, but estimates range from 300 to 6,000 pounds of mercury released annually via cremation. At the high end, that would represent about 2.7 percent of America's current anthropogenic mercury emissions.
On balance, the Green Lantern believes that cremation wins by a nose.
There you go. Cremation it is.