Traditionally, people only have two options when they die: placed inside coffins and buried six feet under, or burned into ashes and placed inside cremation urns. But these days, various companies and individuals have cooked up creative ways to send people off to their resting place.
Here are some of the craziest things you can do after you die:
- Become a piece of jewelry – Diamonds, are after all, forever. So why shouldn’t you be? LifeGem is a company that specializes in turning dead bodies into a one-of-a-kind piece of cremation jewelry. By extracting the carbon from the cremated remains using special chemicals, turning it into graphite and heating it up, you can become a precious gem your loved ones can wear in a ring or necklace in a few weeks!
- Become a plant – You can still do your part in saving the planet, even after you die. How? By becoming a plant. Companies like the Spiritree and Bios Urn make that possible. Spiritree produces biodegradable urns which are planted along with a tree or a plant. The tree or plant’s roots will eventually break the urn and feed off of your calcium-rich ashes and the bottom shell of the urn. Bios Urn, on the other hand, produces coconut shell urns which come with a tree seedling. Your ashes goes into the urn and become part of the plant as it grows.
- Power up a city – In Halmstad, Sweden, local officials cooked up (no puns intended) an idea on how to solve the pollution problem caused by the local crematorium by turning the heat generated by the ovens into a money-saving energy source to heat up the cemetery’s facilities. If the idea worked, then Halmstad has discovered another way to power up the city while solving the pollution problem.
- Go to outer space – If you can’t be an astronaut, you can still be able to fulfil your dream of floating in outer space as space dust. Celestis Inc. makes this happen by launching a portion of your cremated remains into the Earth’s orbit, or into deep space.
