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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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.
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