How Can We Deal With All The Dead?

More people die every day, but our graveyards aren’t getting any bigger. So what happens when we inevitably start running out of places to put the bodies? Jules Howard takes you through the options

- Jules Howard

Anthropologists laud the common human practice of burying our dead as one of the hallmark traits that set us apart from other apes. Town-planners, on the other hand, must lament it. For these individuals face an impossible dilemma: most of the graveyards and cemeteries are nearly full, yet people have a nasty habit of continuing to die.

In the UK, partly because of the surge in town- and city-living, the problem of where to put all these bodies is a particularly thorny one. According to research published earlier this year, a quarter of council-owned cemeteries will be full to capacity in 10 years and one-in-six will be full within five.

How might we avoid the nightmarish situation? What might we do to avoid a serious crisis in the way that we manage our dead? Recycling graves is one obvious option. The graves of people who died 150 years ago tend not to get many visitors, so those that have recently passed can be laid to rest on top with very little fuss. The pros to recycling graves in this way are that it’s cheaper and it means, potentially, that families can be buried in the same graveyards – a final request that is increasingly difficult to honour. The practice is commonplace in Germany.

In Greece and Spain, a similar approach is to rent a ‘niche’ – an above-ground crypt where bodies are laid to rest and decompose naturally, before the remains are removed and put in a communal grave. Again, the benefit of this practice is that it increases the ‘throughflow’ of burials, making for a more efficient use of space.