Biodegradable Coffins What Do You Think?

[baymule]

I want to build biodegradable coffins when I grow up. LOL LOL

Probably never going to grow up .............

 

[digitS']

Go for the pummy stone, Bay'!

It's like that tufa, some folks shape into pots and landscaping objects. The stuff for cinder blocks, too. Pumice or cinder blocks of a gentle nature should make a nice box.

I'm really outta my field of expertise but if it went through a furnace, with some additions, it might end up as glass. "What are you gonna be out there in the infinite beyond?" "Oh, for awhile, i'm planning on being a window ..."

Steve

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Yes and no

Technically you can melt pumice down to make glass (or I suppose, since it is just straight pumice, obsidian) However you couldn't make a window out of it, at least a window you could use. Pumice is MOSTLY silica but like everything else on earth, there are traces of other things in it, and a lot of those will color the resultant glass. For most of the planet, the main contaminant is iron, so the resultant glass is a kind of dark green (basically, the color of a beer bottle) In fact the word "glass" itself comes from an Old Germanic word meaning "green".

To make colorless glass you have to add manganese in just the right amount (too much and the glass becomes purple) or why manganese is sometimes called "glassmakers soap"

I case anyone cares (or wants to tinker with the resultant color by telling people what minerals you want to be buried with) some of the others are the rest of the spectrum is

Blue- for a long time, cobalt was the standard for making glass blue. However now that cobalt has a lot of industrial functions (and hence, is rather more expensive than it was in previous centuries) blue glass made today also is done with iron compounds. Actually those blue iron salts can also be produced organically. if you have ever seen blue coral (Heliopora coerulea), that's how it gets blue. You can also get a sort of turquoise like blue from copper.

Red- a couple of ways to do this depending on the shade of red you want. Iron will give you a brick red. You can also get a bright ruby red, but for that you actually need gold so it's expensive (in fact ruby red glass was so expensive that beadmakers (who were the biggest consumers) used to have tricks to stretch it, like layering a thin layer of red over a larger white/clear core rather than making a solid red bead. Selenium will give you a brilliant almost scary bright red but is toxic so not used anymore

Yellow- Sulfur (makes an ochre yellow) or cadmium (makes a very bright yellow, but again, nasty to work with)

Brown-Boron

Purple-besides the manganese mentioned, you can also do it with polonium (though the resultant glass will presumably not be color stable, since polonium is radioactive

Speaking of radioactive glass, a popular colorant for a period in the 20's to 30's in some places (classically Bohemia but the Japanese glass industry used some too) was uranium oxide. Combined with other things it made a lot of color, but it's most often seen one is a sort of milky grape green. pieces of that are not particularly dangerous (uranium oxide is an alpha emitter, so most of it's particles are unable to even get through a piece of paper, let alone your skin) but will cause a Geiger counter to freak out (I used to have some small oval beads of uranium glass and one bead you give a reading of about 4,000)

Of bigger concern is the fact that adding a lot of carbon to glass (which you would be if you were including a person, since basically we are mostly carbon and water) tends to result in glass that is opaque black. In fact one of the oldest methods of making black glass is to add a high carbon organic product to it (goat dung was popular in ancient times) so you'd get a window that no one could see through.

On the other hand the idea does have some appeal as a vengeance plan in the case of people who are murdered. Put the body in a pumice casket, smelt it down to obsidian, have an expert knapper chip the obsidian into a blade/arrowhead, and then used the blade to execute whoever it was who killed them.

 

[Carol Dee]

@Pulsegleaner thanks for the chemistry/art lesson!

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Two more glassy thoughts

1. I wonder if they threw enough copper filings in with you, you could come out as aventurine/goldstone (a kind of glass with little sparkles in it. There's a sparkly mineral of the same name) We have a lot of iron in us too (in our blood for example) so presumably it would be the bluish kind (theoretically aventurine can be made any color but usually it comes in only three, natural/brown (copper) dark blue and (recently, and not nearly as common) green.

2. For someone with a LOT of money and who wanted to be remembered how about this; Have you body broken down into it's component chemicals, have them added to various batches of glass to make assorted colors, draw them out into rods (the glass sticks used for bead making and other lampworking) then have the rods assembled into a portrait of you melted together and drawn out to form a mosaic cane. You can then take slices off the cane to be used to make either millefiori beads or simply set in pendants as intarsia. The noted Venetian glass master Franchini did more or less this for Garibaldi (though of course, without the whole "put the body in the glass bit."

The main problem is that you'd need a master on the level of Franchini to be able to assemble a portrait cane that actually resembled you, and there aren't all that many (Brian Kerkevet is dead I think and the cane masters of Ptolemaic Alexandria are DEFINITELY so.) So you'd probably have to have a massive amount of money set aside just to rent the experts time. In short this would probably be MORE expensive than a standard funeral.)

 

[Ridgerunner]

How about a stained glass window? Some real interesting possibilities there.

 

[digitS']

the blade to execute whoever it was who killed them.

Good Heavens! A thought that hadn't occurred to me.

Stains? ... yes, that seems to be the nature of my time here. I'm sure most will fade in bright sunlight.

Stained glass could certainly provide a place, for continued remembrance. I don't believe that everyone wants to just vanish ...

Yes, I suspected that the result may be obsidian.

Well, we could think of another meaning of glass, perhaps. That it is a mirror .

Steve

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Well even obsidian doesn't HAVE to be black. It usually is, but there is mahogany (reddish brown with black streaks) snowflake (black with white stars) rainbow (black base but with these green, purple and blue chatoyant parts, Apache tears (sort of a dark honey brown). I used to own a chunk that was solid green. I STILL own a faceted one the color of tanzanite (so deep, deep blue) (and the person who I bought it from also had peridot green and citrine yellow) And back when I was in high school, there was a sample in the science lab case that had red and yellow streaks (at least they said it was obsidian personally I wonder if it was not in fact a piece of industrial slag (which is also often glasslike, and can be a LOT of weird colors)

 

[digitS']

Now, I'm not gonna talk about industrial slag, @Pulsegleaner !

I don't want that in the sculpted coffin, cinder block, or volcanic glass with my remains.

I don't care how much responsibility I have for it ... or, how much sneaks in ...

Steve

 

[Carol Dee]

Two more glassy thoughts

1. I wonder if they threw enough copper filings in with you, you could come out as aventurine/goldstone (a kind of glass with little sparkles in it. There's a sparkly mineral of the same name) We have a lot of iron in us too (in our blood for example) so presumably it would be the bluish kind (theoretically aventurine can be made any color but usually it comes in only three, natural/brown (copper) dark blue and (recently, and not nearly as common) green.

2. For someone with a LOT of money and who wanted to be remembered how about this; Have you body broken down into it's component chemicals, have them added to various batches of glass to make assorted colors, draw them out into rods (the glass sticks used for bead making and other lampworking) then have the rods assembled into a portrait of you melted together and drawn out to form a mosaic cane. You can then take slices off the cane to be used to make either millefiori beads or simply set in pendants as intarsia. The noted Venetian glass master Franchini did more or less this for Garibaldi (though of course, without the whole "put the body in the glass bit."

The main problem is that you'd need a master on the level of Franchini to be able to assemble a portrait cane that actually resembled you, and there aren't all that many (Brian Kerkevet is dead I think and the cane masters of Ptolemaic Alexandria are DEFINITELY so.) So you'd probably have to have a massive amount of money set aside just to rent the experts time. In short this would probably be MORE expensive than a standard funeral.)

FASCINATING!