They've been doing this with sewage and with hog waste for over 50 years. Waste is sprayed over fields ("land application"). It is composted and decomposed into fertilizer. Adding people to it is just additional fertilizer at the end of the day. Germs, as well as any DNA, would be decomposed as well, so the only possible problem would be if they managed to find thousands of people who all died of mercury poisoning and got all their bodies composted and spread on a single field. Heavy metals persist, but no other causes of death would be detectable at that point.
But, we have burial customs and no real pressing need to change. The US has plenty of property for cemeteries. It's not like Germany, where they recycle gravesites. There are no graves for my ancestors in Germany, as their graves were recycled. The current church cemetery where my ancestors were originally buried only has gravesites from the late 1800s onward. There's no trace of my family from the 1500s to the 1700s.
They've been doing this with sewage and with hog waste for over 50 years. Waste is sprayed over fields ("land application"). It is composted and decomposed into fertilizer. Adding people to it is just additional fertilizer at the end of the day. Germs, as well as any DNA, would be decomposed as well, so the only possible problem would be if they managed to find thousands of people who all died of mercury poisoning and got all their bodies composted and spread on a single field. Heavy metals persist, but no other causes of death would be detectable at that point.
But, we have burial customs and no real pressing need to change. The US has plenty of property for cemeteries. It's not like Germany, where they recycle gravesites. There are no graves for my ancestors in Germany, as their graves were recycled. The current church cemetery where my ancestors were originally buried only has gravesites from the late 1800s onward. There's no trace of my family from the 1500s to the 1700s.