Do not do this.

Grave Mistake

UK courts sentenced a man to 12 months in jail after he was found ditching his asbestos waste in a cemetery. 

Security cameras caught the man, 36-year-old Damian Barr, dropping off large hunks of what seems to be toxic paneling in a dumpster at the Foster Hill Road Cemetery in Bedford. 

The camera footage, which was captured in 2022, shows Barr disposing his carcinogenic garbage only feet away from headstones. Though Barr didn’t seem to abandon his waste on any actual grave plots, the image of a dumpster full of pestilent junk so close to a human remains is unsettling — while it’s impossible to raise the dead, obviously, contaminating their graves with toxic waste certainly sounds like a good way to try. 

Zombieland 

On a more serious note, carelessly leaving hazardous litter in any public place seems like an intuitively bad idea. That said, it’s a common practice. 

Just this year, people were found dumping “bad [smelling]” trash at a cemetery in Northern Ireland, mattresses and rotting wood in a Wales cemetery, and tons of waste in a historically Black family gravesite in Pennsylvania. 

“Illegal dumping and littering throughout is causing problems because the trash ends up in the fields, the trash ends up in the cemetery,” Ken Slankard, a member of the impacted Pennsylvania family, told a local ABC syndicate. The family says they first purchased the land in the 1910s, and it already contained graves for Black people born during slavery when they got it. 

“Some people don’t care that there’s a graveyard there,” family member Cheri Leach added. “It’s disgusting.” 

More on evading death: Scientists Intrigued by Drug That Extended Lifespans of Mice While Keeping Them Young-Looking