Green funerals, Sept 18th 2010 P64, N1P105, 葬儀、埋葬、火葬、新技術。
゛We can bury her, burn her, or dump her.゛ The lucrative business of running funneral homes is rarely as blunt as that portrayed by Monty Python, a British satirical television show, and certainly not a front for cannibalism. But burial rites in most of the modern world remain an expensive relic of 19th-century habit. The last big innovation was cremation, which is now under fire for its environmental costs. A study conducted in 2007 for Centennial Park, a cemetery in Austria, found cremations produce the equivalent of 160kg of CO2 per body. A cemetery burial emits a mere 39kg. But maintainance (mowing lawns and the like) makes the ultimate carbon footprint of burial bigger than cremation.
Both tend to make extravagant use of coffins made from valuable hardwoods such as oak and mahogany. In America the coffin may then go into a cumbersome and expensive burial vault. Unpleasant chemicals abound. A paper published in the Journal of Environmental Health in 2008, entitled ゛Drinking Granda,゛ warned about the public-health risks of formaldehyde leaking from cemeteries into groundwater. Cremations are dirty too. Dental fillings mean that they account for as much as a fifth of Britain's mercury emissions： regulations require crematoria to cut mercury emissions by half by 2012.
Customers (or their relatives) want change. A survey in 2007 for the AARP, an American senior-citizens' lobby, found that more than a fifth of respondents wanted greener burials； subsequent surveys have had similar results. That can mean sharing hearses, or using home grown flowers and coffins made with cardboard or willow, which biodegrade easily. But bigger changes are also afoot.(中略)
New technologies are changing the picture, too. One is ゛water cremation゛ or alkaline hydrolysis, where a corpse is placed into a heated solution of water and potassium hydroride. In a few hours, the corpse dissolves into an inorganic liquid, which can be used as a fertiliser, and a white ashlike residue. Aquamation Industries, an Australian company, opened water-cremation facility in Queensland last month. Resomation, a British firm, will install equipment in Florida by the year-end. Its founder, Sandy Sullivan, says conventional cremation produces four time as much CO2 as does this process.
Another nascent technology takes different approach. The body is freeze-dried in liquid nitrogen, then vibrated so that it dissolves into a fine powder. Further process evaporate water and remove things like mercury. The residue can be put into a shallow grave and turns to mulch in about a year. Observers reckon that the Swidish company which developed the idea, Promessa, has promised much and delivered little. But Sussane Wiigh-Masak, its founder, says that franchises are now in place in South Korea and Britain, and that the need for cremetoria to comply with mercury abatement rules could also prompt orders in Sweden iself.
None of this yet amounts to a revolution. There are no good data on take-up of green options. New Technologies need new legal frameworks, and legulators tread very carefully when it comes to death. Members of the public may take time to adjust to the idea of being dissolved, though cremation was seen as outrageous in its day.
