Stuff You Should Know - How Cremation Works

Episode Date: August 31, 2010

Cremation is a burial process practiced around the world, but how exactly does it work? Josh and Chuckers take a detailed look at cremation's history, practices and controversies in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuckers Bryant with a full beard, actually. Yeah. Do you know what that would smell like if it caught fire? It would smell like mayonnaise. It smells worse than mayonnaise ever did. Jerry's in there like

it. She doesn't like the smell of burning hair, huh? Or mayonnaise. Burning mayonnaise would be particularly bad if you had hair on top of it. Burning hairy mayonnaise is the worst thing you can burn. So, Chuck, hopefully that will never happen while you're alive. It could possibly happen after you're deceased, if you're cremated, like a fella named Ralph White who you know about. I've never heard of the guy. You have, too. Chuck, do you remember that horrid webcast we used to have? Yes. There was a guy. Oh, yeah. He was the president, past president of the Adventures and Venturers Club, and not to be confused with the one from South Park. This guy was a real life adventure, and he was, I think he was like a cameraman for a skydiving show called Ripcord,

National Geographic. He was there when they discovered the Titanic. Yeah, he buddies with Jim Cameron. Yeah, he was second director, I think, on Titanic. Yeah, Jim Cameron was also in that club, the little club in LA. That's right. Yeah, I'll bet Ralph White got Jim Cameron in. Yeah, probably. And are we calling him Jim now? I didn't realize we were on that friendly basis. Jim or Jimmy? Well, anyway, Ralph White had a pretty cool post, not post-mortem. He had a very cool posthumous story, and that was he was cremated, and his friends were so dedicated and loyal to him that whenever they go on a travel now, they take about a teaspoon or a tenth of a teaspoon, some very small amount, of Ralph White's cremated remains and scatter them wherever they go. Pretty

cool. Yeah, I think he's in the whaling wall in Jerusalem. He's in Lake Bacall. He went on a space flight, and Ralph White's posthumous adventures kind of illustrate all the wonderful things you can do with a cremated body, which is one of the reasons why people choose to be cremated. It's highly portable, right? Absolutely. And it's nothing new, Chuck. Cremation's been going on for a very long time, hasn't it? Yeah, we won't get in. I mean, we could rattle off every country and when they started, but... We really could because of this fine, fine article written by a freelancer, right, Michelle Kim? I've never heard of this person before, but this is a really great article. But it has been around since prehistoric times. China's been doing it since 8,000 BC. That's

more than 10,000 years ago. More than 10,000 years ago. One part of the history I did find interesting, though, and fitting since we did our Freemason cast was the Freemasons during the French Revolution kind of pushed for cremation because it was the whole, not anti-religion, but just sort of mixing it up with religion. You know, they were anti-Catholic church. Well, yeah. Very much against the church, and they were saying, if you have yourself cremated, it's kind of like sticking your thumb up your nose to the church, right? Well, because Catholics said you can't get cremated for a long time. Yeah, well, it kind of contradicts the whole resurrection thing, you know? I'll say so. The body's kind of got to be intact. It's like the

one thing we can't do, you know? Just burn it. We can rise from the dead, but if you're burned... Yeah, sorry. Yeah, and you don't want to come back and find that you're nothing but ashes because you're going to be ticked off, right? Right. The actual cremator, the cremation chamber, which I like to call the cremator, even though that's not right at all. Right. It sounds like a Krebstar product from the Adventures of Pete and Pete. It does. It was invented in the late 1800s by Professor Brunetti, and it started in earnest in the United States and Pennsylvania in 1876. Yeah. When Pennsylvania's a non-licensed state still, which I thought was interesting. Is it really? Well, there's a little bit of a scandal that we'll talk about later. Yeah.

That apparently the crematory business, you either have fine upstanding people or like scum of the earth running these places, right? Yeah. Let's talk about how this works, all right? Yeah. Well, I got a stat for you real quick, though, as far as its popularity. In 1958, 3.6% of bodies were cremated, and just a few years ago, that number is at 34%, and they expected to be half by 2025. Right. Well, there's a lot of reasons why, right? I mean, we're running out of land. Sure. There's a lot of people who think that burials aren't so green, which is true. Yeah. Yeah, because they use really nice woods and metals, and you have to pour cement lining. Yeah. The bodies and balms, so it's going to eventually leak out all of those things, right?

Well, we'll talk later about whether or not cremation is green, and the spoiler is it's not. Sort of is, but it's not. Well, it's not green, but... It's definitely not green. It's not brown either. It's not black. It's somewhere in between. So, Chuckers, you ready to talk? Yeah, just the actual process is pretty gruesome. Initially, they store the body in a cool room just to keep it nice and fresh for the cremation. It's usually examined by a coroner, and they have to sign off and say this is good to go. Because you can't exhume the body later on if you need to, so no accidental death that hasn't been fully vetted. Like I imagine they wouldn't cremate someone that had any kind of relation to a crime or anything

like that, or at least not for a long time. And then what happens is they remove some things from your body if you have the following. Pacemaker, breast implants, silicone breast implants, uh, prosthesis, or cancer seeds. The little radioactive seeds that they inject into a tumor, and then you shoot with like a laser or a radio frequency generator? Yeah, none of this stuff is good for cremation, so they remove that from your body. But there's some things that can't be removed. Well, they could remove it, but they tend not to. Easy fillings, mercury fillings. Yeah, jewelry and glasses. Like some people want, like you would be buried with your glasses on. They want you cremated with your glasses on. Right. But in some countries, I didn't look this up,

so I don't know what countries, there are laws against anybody who's cremating a body from touching anything on the body. Right. Right. You got to do it how you get it. Right. That's what they say on the shirts that you can buy, I think in the gift shop. And then they put the body, once it's been removed, these things into a flammable box, like a pine or cardboard box. Or one made of hairy mayonnaise. Yeah, they slide it into, the incinerator's already preheated, by the way. Yes, to at least 1100 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 593 degrees Celsius, I think, off the top of my head. Yeah. And that's hot, Chuck. It's got to be hot. But that's not, like you don't just put the body in and then it just burns, it just catches fire. Right. No. They

actually shoot a column of flame at the torso. Like a jet engine. Yeah. Basically. So once the body's in, what's it called, the retort? It's called a retort. They slide it in there on the old metal rollers and families. Sometimes you can watch this process through the window if you want. Yeah. And if you're Hindu, and if it's a Hindu cremation, you can actually push, go. Right. Yeah. I guess to start the column of flame, right? You're just like, so long. Yeah. Tina. So here comes the antenna, the Hindu. So the door is sealed up, obviously. Like you said, they aim it at your torso and then this is what happens. This is the gruesome part, as you would expect when you have a jet engine, a flame shot at your torso.

It ignites the container initially, obviously. Your body starts to dry out. All that water that's in your body leaves. Pretty quick. Yeah, I would imagine. Your soft tissue tightens up, it burns up and it vaporizes. Your skin discolors and blisters and splits just gross. Like a bratwurst on a girl. Yeah, exactly. The muscle charge, it flexes and your limbs actually can extend. Right. Like your limbs are moving. I looked all over the place to find discussions about this stuff, about like a body sitting up. That's the closest thing I saw was, does a body sit up? I think it was a wiki answer, so it has zero credibility. But if your muscles are contracting or tightening or doing anything, like yeah, your arms can go up. Crazy. I mean,

imagine the people in 8,000 BC in China. They're like, wait, they're not dead. They're like waving. Yeah, I had a goldfish. I tried to flush one time and I put him in and he started swimming again. And then I put him back in the tank and he just floated. So it was just like the water motion that was making him look like. Well, no, I didn't flush it. Like I would, when I put him in the toilet, he started moving every single time. It was weird. That is weird. I'm pretty convinced he was dead though. Or he was by the time I froze him in a block of ice. You'll find out when you get to heaven. That's right. So your muscles have charred and tightened and your limbs are flailing about and your bones, obviously, the last thing to go and they are calcified

and then kind of just flake off and crumble into little bone bits. Yeah. And Chuck, uh, the bones that are, uh, or the stuff that is left are the charred bones that are really, it doesn't take a whole lot, I think, to pulverize them, but it does take an extra step and they actually do hold their shape. So it'd go from a body in a box to like a charred skeleton is what it ultimately comes down to. And either rake or sweep the remaining like bone material into something called a cremulator. And that is the, uh, that's a grinder that grinds up everything and pulverizes it into this fine grainy, well, actually coarse grainy powder. Yeah. They described it as like, um, ash is sort of a weird word because it's not like, uh, like charred ash from your

fire. It's, it's more like a gravel. They said like little tiny bits of gravel, right? Because it's pulverized bone, right? Yeah. Um, and it usually takes about two to three hours, depending on the kind of, uh, crematory, I guess whatever machine you put it in. Yeah, there's different kinds, right? And how big your bones are too. That has something to do with it too. But also, um, I found that it depends on the level of, well, there's, there's something called the, um, enter tech for, you should go on to Matthew's crematorium.com. They have specs and it's just weird because these guys are like selling their crematorium, right? Uh, and here's all the specs for them. This thing is like state of the art enter tech four is, um, and it burns the body

in no more than 75 minutes. Really? That's pretty good. That must have been the modern ones that they say are all like automated now. Well, they also sell them ones that burn a body in four hours. Oh, really? So it's like low end to high end. Oh, okay. You know what I mean? Pay for what you get. Yeah. Um, and at the end of this whole process, you're going to end up with about three to nine pounds of ash and that's actually that's where it depends on your bones. They say it doesn't matter like how fat you are because that I think that runs away pretty easily. Yeah, I would think so. It's like your bone structure. Yeah. Bone's tough to burn. I guess so. So Chuck, these things, um, we said that they are preheated to about 1,100 degrees, right? But they get up to about 2,000.

Yeah. So you can't just build this thing. You can't build an enter tech or whatever you're building right out of, um, regular brick or cement or something like that. I think it explode the first time you tried to do this. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So they specialize composite brick material and actually over time, the, the interior will be eaten away by the heat and the expansion and contraction will actually lose surface. So apparently what's recommended is after, um, the bricks lose about half of their width, they have to be replaced. Yeah. And it sounds kind of crude, but the way it's described in the article and the way I've heard it described is it's sort of like a pizza oven. Yeah. They're made of similar things. Right. Cook a pizza. Cook

a body. Cook a body. So, uh, these things go for 250,000. Yeah. Down to 80,000. Yeah. Something like that. Um, and they use natural gas or propane or, um, propane accessories or diesel I've seen. Um, but they used to burn coal. Yeah. And I imagine that was a real pain. Oh yeah. Incinerate a body back in the sixties, I think they were still using coal. Gotta keep stoking that fire. Right. Another thing I thought was cool was, um, and I started thinking too, when you, when you burn a fire, obviously you see ashes kind of floating all over the place. And I thought, well, surely they've got a, you know, account for that when you're burning a body. And they do, they ignite a second flame in a side chamber and that burns off dust that's trying to

escape the retort. And some of them even shoot water out the top to make sure none of the dust escapes out of the top of the plume, I guess. It's called wet scrubbing. Wet scrubbing? Yes. Yeah. What else did we do? Oh, that was the a fluoride thing, right? Yeah. Scrubbing the inside of the, uh, and, uh, carbon sequestration. Yeah. My brain is getting too full these days. Mine too. We need to stop doing the show. I know. And after it's all done, you can actually get it remains, cremated remains. And I found that they say that you shouldn't call them cremates. That's what the, the CNA says. Why? They just say it's sort of a crude thing that people, non-industry people say, let's just shorten it. And they're like, they think it's disrespectful.

Gotcha. So we won't say the word cremates, but you can have your cremated remains mailed to you via USPS if you want. But that's it in the United States. Yeah. You can't do it via FedEx or UPS or you can't if they know what's in the box. Right. And I couldn't find out why. There's no explanation on UPSs or FedEx site. They just say you can't, we won't ship that. Right. They also won't ship a disinterred body. Well, thank goodness for that. I guess. But the only thing I could, the only suggestion I could find why they wouldn't do that is you can't ensure cremated remains. Oh yeah, that's probably it. Which I, I, I imagine they ensure everything somehow. Yeah. And they want to get with a lawsuit. Right. Because people get mad when you lose there.

Yeah, probably so. The other cool thing about USPS though is that they, they make sure to point out that it's got to be a sift proof box. You don't want like ashes leaking out the side and you have to have like somebody's got a sign for it. Right. So usually if you don't get an urn or whatever, when, when you get your cremated remains, the crematorium will have them in like a basically a plastic bag inside maybe a plastic lined box designed to hold this kind of thing. Right. Yeah. And there may be just like very small remnants of other people with your remains. Like they do the best job they can. They burn one body at a time. Like, you know, if you're on the up and up as a good cremator should be. But inevitably when you're talking

about ash and you're sweeping it out, there might be a little bit of Joe mixed in with Harry. If you know what I mean. Well, I know what you mean. So Chuck also, I guess the industry standard is just like you don't want to switch babies in a hospital. At the other end of life, you don't want to switch cremated remains of dead people. Good policy. So apparently they'll stick a tag in your mouth like a metal disc or they'll put it somewhere on your person so that when you're, when you're melted down, this thing's still there. Right. So you can be identified. Right. You've got paperwork that goes with you from the moment you come to the crematorium to the moment you leave that's supposed to be with you every step of the way. And there's basically all this is

supposed to avoid a mix up, right? It's supposed to. It doesn't always, especially when the crematorium operator or owner isn't on the up and up, as you said. And there's been plenty of examples of that, haven't there been? Yeah, I was a little alarmed to find out how little regulation goes on in some states. Yeah, only until the tri-state crematorium scandal of I think 2002 did Georgia close its loopholes and now all crematoriums have to be licensed by the state. Yeah, in Georgia. But I actually got a different number here. She said 23 of the 50 states license. I've actually got only eight do not license is what I found. Oh, that's better. But if you look all of these these examples in this article are in the 2000s. So I wonder if that caused like a

expansion or crematorium regulation reform. I would say so. Because what happened in Georgia will tell you in a sec, but if you see this on the news and you're in like Pennsylvania, they don't want that kind of news hitting their state. So I would imagine it probably spurred some action. It hit Pennsylvania, bud. Yeah, it did. We'll talk about the Georgia guy first. Yeah, Ray Brent Marsh. Yeah, pleaded guilty and apologized. Yeah, he got he owned a crematorium in noble Georgia and I know where that is. So don't ask. I think it's probably in the northwest because it's where Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama come together, which is why I call it tri-state crematorium. You're serving all three states. Sure. And in all three states, the bodies of the

beloved deceased were basically half buried out in the backyard because the cremator broke down and they just never got it fixed. Yeah, the incinerator broke. Yeah. And so I think 336 bodies in total were found and I found that originally they could only charge him with accepting money and fraud for services not rendered. Yeah, there is no law on the books. They hit him with some other stuff though. What else did they do? I think it must have come out after this article. He was actually charged with almost 800 counts of theft and abuse of a corpse. So they actually charged him with stealing these corpses. You don't want to go to prison with an abuse of a corpse wrap on your head. They'll find out about that. Yeah, and he was sentenced to 8,000 years in prison

and plea bargain that down to 12 years somehow. Did you say 8,000 years? Yeah. That was almost a spit take. Yeah, you were drinking your beep drink and you almost spit it out. So yeah, 8,000 down to 12, which is a pretty good deal for him. There was a $36 million settlement from 58 funeral homes that sent bodies to this guy. So they sued the funeral homes. Yeah. And then they brought a suit, an $80 million civil suit settlement against this guy and his father's estate and they probably don't have that kind of dose. So they're probably going to do what happens when that happens, which is he got to the insurance company. Oh yeah. The Georgia Farm Bureau. If the guy didn't even get around to having the incinerator fixed, he doesn't have

80 million. He's got 300 bodies in his backyard, but yeah. So he's in jail right now as far as I know. Almost for 8,000 years. I know. That's a long sentence. You said Pennsylvania didn't want that to happen. Probably not. It did in 2005. What happened there? There was a guy who ran a crematorium and he had a deal with the local women's hospital to cremate the remains of preterm babies. Basically, aborted fetuses. This guy's job was to incinerate them. That's probably not a fun contract to sign. No. Even if that's the way you make your money, you can't feel great about like closing that deal. Right. Yeah. You don't go out for a big fat stake after that one. Exactly. The authorities, I guess, were tipped off and they went into his garage and found in boxes

the remains of 300 fetuses. Actually, 19 of them were post-term. Really? So they were born children that he was supposed to cremate and he didn't. But they could only get them on 19 counts because they were unborn. Right. So they weren't technically human beings under the eyes of the law. So he didn't get anything for those. But for the 19, he got in some trouble. But he had them in boxes in his garage, too, which is apparently the MO of the shady crematorium operator. Yeah. I hope they threw the book at him. Oh, yeah. I'm sure they did. That makes me angry. Can't you tell how angry I am? In Lake Elsinore, California, Josh, in 2003, a dodgy owner was selling body parts for medical research like heads to people, which means that he was cutting these heads off. Oh,

yeah. And he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. And that's they just say prison. And then in Mississippi, there was a really nice guy named Mark Seep who was mixing human remains together, giving out wrong ashes, dumping them into trash bins. And he was found guilty and put in jail, too. Yeah. Did you say that Ray Brent Marsh was giving people wood ash and cement? I didn't mention that. But yeah, that's what he did. Yeah. Because I mean, it's not like he was just like, oh, I got nothing. They burned up entirely. He was like, here's some cement and an urn. Yeah. Thanks for the money. Yeah, I understand a guy's incinerator burning and maybe not having the money to fix it. But I bet you anything, he may have made enough money to get it fixed after that and was like,

hey, I'm kind of onto something here. Right. We don't actually have to do this. This is pure profit. Yeah, exactly. So Chuck, before we get into things that you can do with the remains of a loved one, right? Yeah. Can we talk about whether or not it's green? I got a couple of stats here that I think are important. Yeah. So a lot of people are like a natural burial or regular burial right is not very green. And it's expensive to between like seven and 10 grand. But then they also say, you know, I don't want to go entirely green, which is bio cremation, right is alkaline hydrosis. We talked about that before and what you can do with the dead body. Remember, it turns you into oil that's poured down the drain. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. It is. So this has to be

something in between though, right? For the conscientious person who maybe kind of believes in an afterlife and wants to do more with this body. How do you kind of believe in an afterlife? It's a vague knowing. I wonder where you end up if you kind of believe. It's like a tick sucking right here. Like a hot dog pack. So in 2009, Reuters was doing this article on bio cremation. They were talking about how green is regular cremation. Right. And it's not green at all. Like you think about it, you're using tons of natural gas. Sure. Not tons. It's hyperbolic, but you're using a lot of natural gas or diesel or whatever. You're using a lot of electricity. There's a mission. It takes both. So apparently it releases a standard cremation releases about

880 pounds of CO2, just one body. And that's the big enemy. And it uses enough energy to basically power a 500 mile road trip. Really? So not one and the same. Like these are two separate things. Right. So it uses the energy to get you across country 500 miles and it's depending on the size of your country. Right. And it releases 880 pounds of CO2 into the air. I wonder what that compares to footprint-wise to standard burial. I think it's... Is it still better? I don't know. I think it's just entirely different ways where I think maybe a natural or a regular traditional burial is more polluting, like directly polluting into the ground. That kind of thing is using up resources where a cremation has less of an impact over

time, but immediately it's a lot of input. It requires a lot of input. Gotcha. That's my concept of it. Right. How would mine be in burn? But I like the... Which country was it where they like burn you on top of the wood by like the banks of the river? That's India. Yeah, I like that. That's how I would want to go. Well, buddy, if you live in India and you're a Hindu, that's exactly how you have to go. That was a perfect segue to the religion. I guess so. You said Hindus, they mandate cremation. Yeah, they're the only religion that does. Yeah, and it's called... I'm going to go ahead and give it a whirl here. Anthem Sankar, which is last rite. Nice. You want to hit the other one? Antiesti. Yeah, Antiesti, I think. Which is last sacrifice. Yeah, and those

are one of the 16 life rituals. I guess it would be the last one. Actually, I'll probably be corrected. There may be one after that with the whole rebirth and all that. Maybe. But I guess the smoke gets the body to the next life. I bet it's one of the last four. I'll bet it is. I'll wait drawing that. And they, yeah, like you said, they're Hindus, so they say you dispose of this body and it ushers you and helps you be reborn into the next life when you're ready to be made. And while Hinduism is the only religion that mandates you have, that's how your body is disposed of. Right. Sikhism and Jainism are both kind of strongly adores it, although they don't require it, right? Right. And you were saying that they cremate people in India along the banks of

the river. Yeah. Most of their cremations, from what I understand, are open-air cremations. See, I like that idea. There's a city called Varanasi, which apparently is the holy city to be cremated in, and you are cremated out and open along the banks of the Ganges. Yeah, that's nice. But they do have an electric crematorium, but since there's a billion people who live in India and all of them want electricity, this place suffers power outage. That's sad. If you're a Christian, Jewish, or you're Muslim, Josh, they generally frown upon it or outright prohibit it depending on which religion it is. Yeah. Islam prohibits it. Yeah, they want you buried that day. Right. The same day you die, preferably. Right. So in Judaism, Chuck, I don't think it's actually

restricted. I think you can if you want to, but among Orthodox and conservative Jews, the memory of the Holocaust is still understandably smart to the point where they're like, why would you want to be cremated? There's legacy is still around. So there's a lot of Jews who don't want to be cremated even though their religion doesn't prohibit it. Right. Understandably. Protestants actually is where you're going to be find some more open minds to cremation. They don't have any literature that says you should do this, but they're definitely more understanding about it than other religions. Right. And we talked about the Catholic Church having a problem with it. Yeah. Because of its association with subversiveness toward the Church. But in the 60s, the Catholic

Church said, hey, we've never really prohibited it. Right. You can get cremated if you want. And apparently they gave it a boost. Yeah. That in the Hula Burger. People really catered to the Catholics in the 60s. 30% I found. Canada says that 30% of Catholics are cremated now. So that's quite a boost, I would say. Right. The Mormons also, they're not big on cremation, although they don't prohibit it. Yeah. And in countries where it's traditional, they're like, yeah, please go ahead. But the Orthodox Eastern Orthodox Church says, nay, nay, nay. Good point. Thanks. Where are we now with some, can we talk about finally what you can do with your remains? I think it's high time at you. Not what you can do with your remains, because you clearly can't do anything. That's

not what you can do with your remains. Right. But what your friends and family can do with your remains. And sometimes they like to keep you in an urn, and they have these little cemetery-like buildings called a columbarium. And they just hold ashes from what I understand. Like your urn. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a vault. So some people choose that. That costs them dough, obviously. Go ahead and tell us about your hero. I know you want to mention that. Who, Hunter T? Yeah. Yeah. He was mixed with fireworks and shot out of a cannon, 153-foot cannon, also called the Memorial Tower. And apparently it was an organization called Heavens Above Fireworks that did this, and anybody can do it. And Johnny Depp paid for the whole party, right? Yeah. And from

what I saw, if it was this British company, he would have paid about the equivalent of 3,000 U.S. dollars for a large fireworks display. That's what they charge. As soon as you mentioned money, actually, I did see the average cremation cost is about 1,600 bucks. Yeah. And the average funeral, I saw five grand in this article. It's ten grand a sighted. We'll say somewhere between five and ten thousand dollars. Let's. But back to things you can do. We would be remiss if we didn't mention to our nerd friends that Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek fame, was everyone knows this. He was shot into space. So was Timothy Leary. Oh, yeah, that's right. By the same company, Celestus. They're still in business as far as I know. I bet they are.

And then you've got Lifegem, which we've talked about, I think, again on the webcast, you can take your cremated remains and have them compressed into a synthetic diamond. You can have your remains mixed into paint. And I guess that's not so much you can have, but you can probably just do that. It depends. There's actually a guy who does something called ash portraits. Oh, really? He paints the picture. He does it just with the person's ashes. Oh. But he'll also mix it in with oil or whatever. Interesting. But he does portraits of the deceased. All right. I've changed my mind. I want to be remembered as dogs playing poker. That'd be pretty awesome. That'd be really cool. What else can you do? You can become part of

the coral reef. I know there's companies that do that. There's a company called Eternal Reefs, I think, is the big one. That's a pretty obvious name, don't you think? And well, they actually make different sized reefs. And what they do is they mix your remains with cement. And so the big one, it can accommodate up to four family members. So if your family went down in a plane and you just feel like shelling out for one coral reef, they've got you covered. It's like seven grand. Really? Uh-huh. And it's pretty big size. And it's cool looking. I mean, it looks like an artificial reef. And then you take it out and dump it overboard. Fish live amongst your family members who I really, really hope love scuba diving. Exactly. You remember

Keith Richards a couple of years ago? He's still alive. Well, now his dad passed away. And he said that he snorted his father with cocaine. And then, I mean, apparently he said this in an interview. Then that came out and he was like, no, no, no, no. I was just kidding around. Of course, I didn't snort my father. Yeah. I think he snorted his father. Yeah, I think he did too. There's a six feet under episode where these people snort the remains of this coral. Really? Yeah. I remember that one. It was a good one. I do have some stats for you, though, what people seem to like to do. 38% keep the ashes at their home. 37% bury the ashes. 21% do the scatter. Very popular. I thought it'd be more popular than that, though. The most popular one is water scattering. And number

two is scattering somewhere on family property. Oh, really? 3% are put in the columbarium. And you might notice, Josh, that adds to 99%. Yeah, there's 1% that go unclaimed. So sad. It is sad. And I apparently that people who own crematoriums find it sad too, because even though after a set period of time in states that regulate this kind of stuff, which did we say the Federal Trade Commission regulates mortuaries, there's no federal oversight for any crematorium. Comes out of the state. But in states where there are regulations, they still say you can throw these out after a set period of time. But most crematoriums, the up and up ones will hang onto these things for decades. Because again, it's a small box. But I mean, they don't want to just

throw it away. It's a person. And it's only 1%. So I don't imagine they're like overflowing with unclaimed remains. I would hope not. But since you did mention the scattering, we should talk about some of the laws about scattering because you can't just scatter anywhere. No, the National Park Service has no official stance on scattering remains. They leave it up to each individual park. But most of the parks say unless there's like a grave area, like a designated grave area, you can't scatter ashes here. Well, it also said they kind of turned a blind eye. Like Oh, really? They know it goes on. And I'm sure some ashes in Yosemite Park are like, how are you going to tell the difference between that and like fire ash or dirt or whatever.

But state parks, they say actually the National Forest Service doesn't regulate anything on their land. So that's where you would probably want to go like avoid the National Park and just stay in the National Forest or go to your state park that was a beloved state park because they're a little more lax than the National Parks. Right. If you want to do water scattering or ocean scattering, the EPA says you got to be three miles away from the coastline. Very prudish. California is like, that's way too much. They still have a restriction, but it's 500 feet, right? Yeah, pretty close. And people don't always follow regulations, right? Yeah. So you want to tell about the Cubs fan? Yeah, this is kind of a nice story. Steve Goodman died of leukemia in 1984. Die Hard Cubs fans,

sadly did not get to see the Cubs win a World Series as likely neither will you and I. And four years later, he, his buddy snuck in before opening day and threw the ashes into the wind out over the field. Nice. Pretty cool. That is pretty cool. You ever hear of Graham Parsons story? Yeah, his body was stolen, right? Yeah, his friends. He said that he wanted to be scremated and scattered on Caprock in Joshua Tree National Park, right? And his parents found out he was dead and had his body shipped back for a private funeral. Oh, really? And his friends found out that they weren't going to be invited. So they stole him and took him out to Joshua Tree and opened the casket, threw some gasoline on him and set him on fire. Five gallons of gas, right?

And it didn't work because we've said what it takes. So he was half cremated by the time the cops showed up. He's sort of melty. And just like Georgia, back then there was nothing about, there were no penalties for stealing a corpse. So they got them for theft of a casket, I think. That was, did you see that movie? No. Johnny Knoxville played the guy that his buddy? Uh-huh. It's not very good. I did stay in that hotel, though. Actually, I meant to mention that in the Route 66. Yeah, the Joshua Tree Inn. Cool. Not in his room, though. And before we move on from scattering, Josh, we have to mention, because we like to mention our movies, the excellent, excellent scene from The Big Lebowski. The scattering scene in The Big Lebowski. When all of them just blew

back all over them? It was Steve Buscemi that died, right? I think so. And he threw him out in the wind and blew back in their face over the ocean. It was good. It was very good. Chuck, if I am dead and I'm being cremated and I'm part of 75% of the population, what country am I in? Sweden? Switzerland. Switzerland. If I've been cremated and I am part of just a meager 3% of the population, what country am I in? Ghana. That's right. That's right. Right. And in between, or actually higher than that, Hong Kong is 83%. Places like the Czech Republic and Singapore and the UK are sort of mid to high 70s. China and the Netherlands are about half. And Italy, as far as European countries was, I'm sorry, Ireland was 6%. Italy was 7%. I

bet that has something to do with the Catholic thing. I would think so, for sure. The U.S. is about 30%, right? Yeah. I think it's a very large Protestant population. Right. And Hindu. And there's also pet cremation. Yeah. If you want to get into a burgeoning industry that went from pretty much nothing to, it's a $3 billion industry is the latest stat, get into pet cremation. And the people at Matthew's crematorium supply, they make pet cremators, too. Oh, they do humans and pets? And animals, too. Apparently, there's different types. So I guess one you could fit a horse into and one are made for dogs or something. Right. I would be more likely to go into one of those because they say that some of the pet-only crematoriums are a little dodgy. Yeah, they're

totally unregulated. Yeah. So they're just like burning your pets together and you don't know that the ashes you get. And if you're serious enough about your pet to get your pet cremated, then you probably want your pet's ashes. Right. So you can handle cremation at home. Just dig a shallow hole in your backyard to serve as a firebreak and do your neighbors a favor and shave your pet first before you set it on fire. We buried my animals growing up, my pets. Did you? Yeah. We have, I think at my old house, we probably had like four or five pets buried out in the woods. But we lived on like two acres in the woods. It wasn't like in a neighborhood. You didn't set any on fire? No. No, no, no. Okay. Well, that's it for cremation. Thanks for joining us for that one,

right, Chuck? Yeah. I think we've covered pretty much everything in there. But if you want, it's a good, good article. High caliber HowStuffWorks article. Good. Not like the rest of these Snickers. Just type in cremation in the search bar, the jazzy search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. Jazzy? I'm just trying these stuff. We've been getting lots of suggestions, by the way. I like ubiquitous search bar. It's pretty good. It's not everywhere, though. I mean, I guess it is everywhere, but it's... Yeah, you're right. So I guess it's time for listener mail. Yeah, buddy. I got a couple today, a couple of short ones. The first one is from the sauna cast, and it's a little old, but I promise this guy would read it. This is from Mark in

EastonMD. I know you guys won't read this on a podcast. Those are usually the ones I read. But I just thought I'd write to tell you what happened to me this morning. In my frantic rush to get my daughter, Ellie, to a summer camp on time, I had to run out of the house without having breakfast. That caused me to have to stop at a fast food joint, get one of those gross, greasy breakfast sandwiches. You would think it's bad enough, but it gets worse. As I drive from the driveway, I push play on the iPad and start listening to the show in saunas, where I started hearing about butt funk, Chuck sweating out gallons of fluid, and having to visualize a naked Vigo Mortensen fighting in a sauna made my otherwise gross sandwich and greasy potato things

one for the books. By the way, the podcast that I queued up next was all about taste buds, so now I know how I was able to taste my sandwich in the first place. Thanks a lot, guys. That's from Mark. If you do happen to read this on the air, it would make Ellie and Lydia's day, and those are his daughters. Oh, hey, Ellie and Lydia. So, Mark, that is for you, my friend. And then this one, I didn't even think about it, but it's kind of fitting. Do you remember when I told you about the little girl in Kent, Washington, who named her Betafish, Chuckers Jr.? I saw this one. Chuckers Jr. is no more. Monday night, I put Chuckers Jr. inside his small bowl so I could clean his bowl in the morning. Yesterday morning, I went to make my breakfast in front of his bowl

as usual, but to make my breakfast, I thought she meant make his, which would be pretty cute. I felt something sticky on my foot, and I looked down, and to my horror, I saw Chuckers Jr. stuck to my foot all dried out. And now this horrible, apparently betas, have been known to jump out of their bowls. And I guess Chuckers Jr. jumped pretty far because his bowl was a good foot away from the edge of the counter, yet he still ended up on the floor. My theory is that he probably flopped around or something onto the floor. Can you just let the little girl think her Betafish is special? Yeah, you're right. Chuckers Jr. is special, Katie. Also, I found out that the bowl that he was in had only a centimeter from the top. Centimeter? Where's she from? Liberia? Yeah.

Yeah. She's from Kent, Washington. She said you're usually supposed to leave about an inch between the top of the thing, I guess, to make it harder to jump out. It's the same thing, right? One centimeter equals one inch? I think so. It's like 40 degrees below. She ends with this, at least Chuckers Jr. dyed a healthy fish. That's from Katie, age 13, in Kent, Washington. Well, thanks for your optimism, Katie. Yeah. Kent, I'm sorry about your breakfast sandwich, although I'm hungry now. Yeah, it wasn't Kent, it was Mark. She was from Kent. Oh, yeah. That's alright though. Mark, sorry about your breakfast sandwich. Kent, I have no idea who you are. If you have a really cool cremation story, we want to hear about it, so wrap it up in an email

and send it to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Want more HowStuffWorks? Check out our blogs on the HowStuffWorks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff, stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's today's Fortnite weather report.

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