“Careful with that green juice! It’s Uncle Joe.”

Iona Erskine-Kellie

After a person dies, he tends to get gross pretty quickly. So what do you do with him? Well, the city of Cambridge has two environmentally-friendly ideas to dispose of dead bodies.

1.) Put the dead body in a silk bag. Then put immerse the bag in a strong alkaline liquid for three hours. The body dissolves! 

Mathias Klang

All that’s left behind is a greenish fluid and some white dust. (This is called resomation.)

The fluid isn’t toxic, so you can save it or just pour it out on the lawn!

2.) Freeze the dead body using liquid nitrogen. And I mean FREEZE it down to minus-320° Fahrenheit (minus-196° Celsius). That makes the corpse so brittle, it’s freeze-dried! Then you can just break it into tiny bits and compost it. Or bury it. Or sprinkle it on the lawn!

And “natural burials” are already allowed. This is when you put the body in a compostable container and bury it. Then it composts naturally! 

If you think these ideas are gross, think about the alternatives: Burying a body and letting it rot in a metal box, or barbecuing it until it turns to dust. These methods are just as gross and much less environmental!

More here.

Make Me a Coffin with Racing Flames!

Death is just part of life. And since life is gross, it makes sense that death would be gross, too. (I mean, all that decomposing…come on!)

But just because death is disgusting doesn’t mean it has to be such a downer. Or at least, that’s the attitude of the good people at . . . Happy Coffins!

The Happy Coffin website says that they want to “dismantle the taboos surrounding Death & Dying by encouraging 'die-logues' about this often-sensitive subject.” 

Get it? DIE-logues? You’re killing me! And once that happens, you may as well put me in a light-hearted coffin. And that's actually a healthy attitude to take about death. Even so, I was surprised to see that the Happy Coffin people had set up a page for “Death” on Facebook. (Do I really have to be FRIENDS with it?!)