Cremation Isn’t as Earth Friendly as You May Think

by Sandra Folzer, Weavers Way Environment Committee

About a decade ago, i Wrote an article on green burials. This is an update for readers to consider them as an alternative to cremation.

Many of us try to live a sustainable lifestyle, conserving energy and avoiding plastic when possible, but that thinking goes up in a cloud of smoke when we die. When people choose to be cremated, they are promoting climate change by wasting energy and polluting the air. If you’ve advocated for the environment during your life, why should that change with death?

Most of my friends say they want to be cremated. I understand that, because it seems to be the easiest and cheapest way to deal with death. However, cremating one body takes two to three hours of 1,400-1,800-degree heat and uses an average of 28 gallons of fuel. That is an enormous use of fossil fuels.

I wonder if cremation is the choice because that way, loved ones don’t have to think about the messiness of death. The body is burned, and we are left with clean, neat ashes. A decaying body with all its odors is an image most of us would prefer to avoid.

But death isn’t pretty. Ironically, when people choose a sealed metal coffin because they imagine the body gets preserved, they don’t realize the body explodes from a buildup of gases, as a rabbi friend pointed out to me.

During cremation, toxic gases like nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide are emitted, as well as particulate matter and heavy metals. A study published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health in December 2020 found that mercury from crematoriums, which typically is released when dental fillings are burned, made up more than seven percent of total mercury emissions in the atmosphere in British Columbia.

The Dirty Details of Cremation

Do you know what happens after a body is burned or cremated? (Maybe you don’t want to know.) The skeleton is still recognizable, so that gets ground up after a metal detector scoops up any metal parts — fillings, hip and knee replacements, etc. Only after the remains are pulverized are they given to the family.

I could rationalize cremation if the fuel burned were used to heat something else. A crematorium in Redditch, Worcestershire in the UK has been supplying nearly half of the energy needs of a recreation center there since 2012, according to a February 2011 article in the Independent. Another crematorium in Durham, UK, uses the heat it generates to spin turbines for electricity. The town of Halmstad in western Sweden has been using the heat from its crematorium to heat local homes and businesses since about 2009.

Given that crematoria in the United States are not using the energy they generate to heat any buildings, the most sustainable means for burial is the green burial, a way of caring for the dead with minimal environmental impact, according to the Green Burial Council. Traditional Jewish and Muslim burials are “green; the body is put into a plain wooden coffin with no nails and there is no embalming, because defiling the body is against Jewish law.