Over 3,000,000 people die in the U.S. alone every year. I get that there are other options than burying like cremation, but it seems logical that we would have a shortage of cemetery space. Further, you don’t see cemeteries expanding or new ones being built.
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Bodies aren’t left in cemeteries in perpetuity. For most cemeteries, the plots are leased out when you buy them. This means after some period of time (I believe 100 years is the standard unless you pay for longer), they would exhume the body, remove the headstone, place the bones in an ossuary, and now there’s a new plot that has opened up.
There’s also the case for older cemeteries and no one knows who actually owns the land. This happened somewhat close to where I live, there was some centuries old cemetery that was originally the middle of nowhere, but ended up being on the corner of what became two primary streets. Places wanted to develop there, but the county didn’t know who actually owned the land. It’s been held up for the last decade or so from commercial places trying to buy that land, but the cemetery part has now been relocated.
It’s not as much land as it seems.
8×3=24 square feet per grave. Times 3 million is 2.58 square miles. The continental US is 3 million square miles.
6 decades ago the cremation rate in the US was around 6%, today it’s around 55%. The expect burial rate is around 36%. So right there that means that only around 1 million people out of your 3 million will be buried.
The average grave is 8 x 2.5 feet or 20 square feet. 20 million square feet is about .7 square miles, so it’s not actually that much space. Also the US is very very big, only space within cities is at a premium.
That being said, there’s no guarantee that when you are buried you’ll stay there forever.
A lot of cemeteries lease out the space for anywhere from 15 to 100 years. Once the lease is up, and the descendants aren’t willing to pay for a renewal the grave is often re-used for someone else.
Only people of high importance or notoriety, or people buried in privately owned grave sites will typically stay forever. Even then if a grave site is in the way of important construction there’s processes for digging up the remains and allowing the construction.
Arlington National Cemetery is a good example of a graveyard that’s permanent but is rapidly running out of room. Today they only accept cremated remains, and within a few decades will either have to change their practices, expand, or close. It’s possible Arlington will close leaving space only for VIPs like Presidents and Medal of Honor ~~winners~~ recipients, while an alternate site is prepared for future growth but we will see what they decide to do.
As a point for your example, in Japan burial space has become such a problem that cremation is now mandated by law for all except emperors. You can’t be buried even if you wanted too because space is such a problem. This practice is accepted in Japan because of its large Buddhist population for which cremation is expected practice.
In Muslim countries however burial is mandatory.
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In the US only around 36% of people actually get buried, the majority get cremated, which mean about 1 million people get buried each year.
Graves are also not permanent, usually after 100 years the remains are removed to leave room for someone else, unless someone pay to keep the grave longer. If you need to bury 1 million of bodies each year and those bodies will be replace each 100 years, that mean you need room for 54 million graves. There is 20,200 registered cemeteries in the US, meaning that they only need to be of an average size of 2,700 Graves to be able to keep burying people for ever. A lot of cemeteries are much bigger than that, the Arlington Cemetery have 400,000 graves.
Obviously, that’s more complicated than that. Some graves last longer because of their historic significance, or the family keep paying for the graves, the number of death per year change over history, etc. But that point remain, there is an upper limit of grave you need to keep burying people forever, meaning that we don’t need to constantly increase the amount of land we need. We just need to expand the cemeteries to accommodate the higher overall population.
Let’s do the math! Estimating that 200 million people have ever died in the history of the US, making the conservative assumption that almost all of them were buried, and given that the standard burial plot size is 8 feet by 3 feet, that works out to a total national cemetery area about the size of Chicago.
Which is a lot of land, but not enough to worry about.
It’s also 5% of the area of the country’s golf courses, so we can just use the 18th hole to bury people and we’re good for another century.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=200000000+*+%288+feet+*+3+feet%29+%2F+area+of+Chicago
https://danoshinsky.com/2009/07/02/how-much-space-do-golf-courses-take-up-in-america/
Edit: [link](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=200000000+*+%288+feet+*+3+feet%29+%2F+area+of+Chicago) because Reddit is stupid.
In the UK they sometimes inject the graves with lyme to speed up the decomposition process.
I was amazed the first time I saw a graveyard in both the US and Australia. The spaces between them were massive. Crowded cemeteries are the norm here
When a gravesite is ignored (be it because the family of the dead is themselves dead or has moved) it’s surprising how fast a grave can be lost once no one is there to care for it. Hell I actually did a research project in college documenting the remains of a whole church gravesite in Philly that was completely abandoned and only discovered when a construction crew started digging up bones
In some families where we own the plots forever (really forever!), we reuse the graves. If a grave is needed, we open an older plot, sweep aside any bone fragments, and bury the next cadaver.
One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of people who live in a city might not be from that city and will often request to be buried elsewhere.
On top of that, many larger cemeteries will often have mausoleums, both private and public that can hold hundreds of dead bodies or cremated remains.
Something that often goes unnoticed is that a lot of cemeteries have big empty areas. Most of the cemeteries in my city are like this and have wooded areas surrounding them that can be cleared if need be
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