Got your taxes done? That old saying, "nothing is sure but death and taxes" comes to mind on this taxes due day.

Forgive me for bringing up the other part, but I decided you'd want to know there is a new alternative to cremation that is being described as more environmentally friendly.

With cremation, you get back about 5 percent of the body in the form of ashes. The rest of us is spewed out of a smokestack, meaning the release of nitrogen oxide, hydrogen chloride, sulphur dioxide, and dioxins. Worse, mercury from dental fillings vaporizes and goes into the atmosphere. And crematories aren’t typically equipped with pollutants scrubbers. If a crematory were a power plant, people would be up in arms over the air pollution.

And what to do with the ashes? A lot of them get scattered in various public places, the alleged sentimental favorite of the deceased. I had envisioned something like those wispy, light ashes you get from burning a piece of paper. But several years ago, when my dad's ashes came in the mail from Texas, I discovered they are heavy and gritty and there are chunks.

With burials, bodies filled with medications and pathogens act as sources of groundwater contamination. They are full of pills, full of embalming fluid, full of prions.

A prion is an infectious agent composed of protein in a misfolded form. This is in contrast to all other known infectious agents, which must contain nucleic acids (either DNA, RNA, or both) along with protein components. Prions are responsible for the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in a variety of mammals, including bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, also known as "mad cow disease") in cattle and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. All known prion diseases affect the structure of the brain or other neural tissue and all are currently untreatable and universally fatal.

Alkaline hydrolysis mimics natural decomposition — but it is compressed into hours rather than weeks or months. It works by breaking down proteins and destroying DNA and leaving behind nothing but harmless pathogen-free byproducts supposedly clean enough to fertilize pastureland or a farmer’s field. During alkaline hydrolysis, medical devices, mercury fillings and other contaminants easily can be removed after the fact and disposed of properly.

The process has been around for nearly two decades, but has mostly been used to decompose animal carcasses and donated human cadavers. Now, to bring this process to mainstream funeral homes, an entrepreneur has named this CycledLife and calls the process the Coffin Spa.

In the Coffin Spa, a body is submerged in an alkaline/water mixture that is pumped through the “coffin” and heated to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. After six to eight hours, the corpse is reduced to a brown liquid and a small pile of bone residue, which we're told could be used for fertilizer. I'm sure there is a website for this, but I'm too creeped out to Google it.

If they are still alive, Jeffrey Daumer, John Wayne Gacy, and that killer on The Silence of the Lambs are probably wishing they'd been able to work out the details.

Reading through this, I see plot elements for one of those scary serial killer murder stories, "Coffin Spa" sounds like a book title, and now we all know how to get rid of that pesky body if the need ever arises.