Grist has a piece up about greening your death. Some of the advice is unsurprising: have your funeral near where the people who care about you live so there are minimal transportation costs, try to get people to carpool, etc.
The interesting part is that cremation is greener than burial. You just have to tell the funeral home to take out your fillings, which contain mercury, before they burn you up. When you get buried, you generally get embalmed with toxic chemicals. There is a Green Burial Council, but the green burial industry is still in its infancy.
A Hindu friend of mine told me that Hindus traditionally don’t go in for burial or even graveyards, which is deeply enviro of them because a graveyard is big lawn maintained with pesticides.
Image: flickr/bookish in north park
Forbes.com has a good piece up about how not to get duped by greenwashing construction and home design brands. It describes in concise, user-friendly detail exactly why so may products that have green seals on them are harmful to the planet.
This makes Forbes greener, at the moment, than a whole lot of Web and print publications out there that have “green” in their titles. The problem with green-oriented sites is often that the editorial impulses encouraged by the publishing business—generally there is somebody like Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, and that person is generally saying, ‘get me some big beautiful pictures of things people can buy’—are inherently pretty un-green. The idea, as Forbes points out, is to go to the salvage yard, not the boutique, and to never replace anything when you don’t have to. You shouldn’t chuck your old linoleum floor in a landfill so you can install the green-friendly floor you saw on Greenoramatopiafuntime.com.
