A New Option for Afterlife

Conventional burial or cremation of the dead in this country bears a lot of resemblance to toxic waste disposal. For burial, most bodies are saturated with toxic embalming chemicals, hermetically sealed inside metal or highly finished wood caskets, and encased in impervious concrete burial vaults, all of which is buried six feet (2 m) underground—well beneath the zone where much biological decay might occur. Alternately our bodies are cremated, which, according to the Sierra Club, can release dioxin, trace metals, hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acids, sulfur dioxide, and the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Hardly the way an environmentally concerned architect or builder would want to leave this world.