How many graveyards are there in the world

As a result of dwindling supply for millions of aging citizens, plot prices are shooting up. To try and alleviate the situation, the government provides incentives for those who chose to get cremated instead of buried. The Chinese government has even started subsidizing sea burials to compensate, paying Shanghai residents 2, yuan each to scatter ashes over Hangzhou Bay.

In more crowded parts of the world, cremation is the norm, but even finding space for an urn can be a challenge. In Hong Kong, thousands of families store ashes in sacks in funeral homes, while they wait years for a space in either public or private cemeteries.

And in Singapore, one private company stores 50, urns, which can be automatically retrieved with an electronic card. In the second-most populous country in the world, India, the majority Hindu population scatter the ashes of the dead after cremation - but Muslims and Christians, who bury bodies, are running out of suitable land.

Others regions, such as the US state of Minnesota, are using resomation, dubbed "green cremation". Mr Morris says: "Resomation is a process where the body is exposed to alkaline, which breaks it down to ash and liquid.

New 'green cremation' machine opens. The wood alone could be used to build 4. Additionally, embalming fluid—which caught on in the US after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated—is highly toxic, and those toxins can leach into the soil and air. In even small quantities it can irritate the throat and eyes, and in large quantities it can be deadly.

Formaldehyde, a key ingredient in embalming fluid, has been labeled a carcinogen , potentially posing a risk to those who work in burial services. The fire produces pollutants when certain materials in the body melt. Yet, we persist because we want to respect our loved ones in death as much as we respected them in life. This means holding their memory and connecting it to something tangible, like a grave. Mary Shelley famously felt an intense connection to her mother, who died soon after giving birth to her.

The church graveyard became her respite from a turbulent childhood, and offered solitude for her to read and learn. Her intimate awareness of death was a massive influence on her writing. In Alexandria, Coleman Cemetery is a small, three-acre piece of land that contains roughly 1, burials. A few graves had plants on them, and looked like they had been visited recently. While I was there, a tan sedan rolled up and a man stepped out to pay his respects.

I saw that one of these gravestones was not like the others. I was curious about this, so I looked it up. The company that operates Coleman Cemetery is the W.

Bacon Funeral Services company. It has a contract with the DC government to cremate and bury people who died without anyone stepping forward to bury them. Most often, they are those who died while experiencing homelessness, the extremely poor, and the elderly. The city allows for unclaimed bodies to be cremated, and the W. Bacon Funeral Services then buries them in two plots, one of them being Coleman.

The DC government does not release names of people who have gone unclaimed, and they are buried together in a coffin. Instead, it looked like a marker that may have been placed by Ron Reaves, who was the cemetery caretaker featured in the Washington Post article.

In the article from , he said he would try to use his own money to mark the grave. Coleman Cemetery. As we move west, the map has significantly fewer red dots and therefore fewer cemeteries. This could be because, at the time of westward expansion, the country was not participating in a war on American soil.

First, he was shocked to learn that there are some places in the country that have no living population but still has cemeteries. He says "only the dead sleep here. Secondly, Stevens said he realized that "the cost of dying" has drastically increased over the decades.