Think you get to stop being green just because you kicked the compost bucket? With land space for burial at a premium and crematoriums pumping potentially dubious people-smuts into the sky, you have got to be kidding. Stop slacking off, corpses: If you can't live green, it's time to start dying green.
Short of a Shaun of the Dead-style zombie-fueled economy, what's the most efficient way to dispose of remains? Here are a couple snazzy new approaches to keeping dead bodies green (without, you know, mold):
Shatter them. Freezing bodies with liquid nitrogen, then vibrating them into pieces and evaporating out the water, leaves an organic powder that can be used as mulch. Because if you're going to push up daisies, you might as well do it in a way the daisies enjoy.
Make them into syrup. You wouldn't want to put it on your pancakes — or if you would, please seriously evaluate your life — but bodies can be turned into an easily-disposed syrup or, in a new version of the process, a "sterile liquid." Alkaline hydrolysis uses water and caustic potash to dissolve the body, except some chunks of bone that can be ground and given to the family or used by giants to make bread.
Recycle them. We wrote earlier this year about a U.K. town that's pumping waste heat from the local crematorium into its public swimming pool. Even if you find that creepy, you have to admit it's resourceful. And it's not the first time a town has recycled crematorium heat — Halmstad, in Sweden, was doing it in 2008.
