Green Daily

If you're wondering whether you should join Grandpappy McCracken in the family crypt, or follow your dreams and shoot your remains off into orbit (while your wife plays the Star Trek theme on kazoo), let me offer some alternatives.

You might, for instance, get buried the old-fashioned way -- in a box, in the ground. But beware -- this has some considerable environmental drawbacks, as cemeteries put 30 million feet of hardwood, 104,272 tons of steel and 1.6 million tons of reinforced concrete into the ground every year. Those caskets are coated with chemicals like methyl and xylene -- which are so harmful that casket manufacturers are on the EPA's list of top 50 hazardous waste generators. Instead, try a green burial, so your body can decompose naturally and enrich the land (just like bodies used to do for thousands of years). For more on how that works, check out this helpful site.

You can also ditch the box by getting cremated, but studies have found that this isn't very healthy for the environment either. To make your cremation more eco-friendly, try companies that do something good with your ashes -- like Eternal Reefs, that mixes your remains with concrete to create artificial reefs, or C.R. Concrete, Inc, that uses your ashes to make memorial benches, yard art, or commemorative stones.

Because everyone dies eventually -- and just because you've shuffled off this mortal coil, that doesn't mean the rest of us won't judge you. (Just kidding -- mostly.)