United States

Transplant donation & Scientific donation is legal in every state.

Sea burial is legal with a special permit between 3 and 10 miles off the coast.

Tomb burials are legal in every state and you can even be mummified beforehand.

Deep ground burial is legal in every state, though shallow green burial in a managed wildlife habitat is not.

Cremation indoors is legal everywhere, though open-air funeral pyres are currently only legal in one town in Colorado.

Aquamation (also known as Alkaline Hydrolysis) is currently legal in 18 states, though it has to be done at a facility with stringent rules, so it's legal in more states than it's available.

Cryogenic preservation is only fully legal in 4 states. The great majority of US states don’t abide by cryonics contracts, even if legally created by the deceased. Cryonicists sometimes get around this by signing a Document of Gift, which essentially is a donor’s card that allows you to donate parts of your body. This document is accepted in nearly all 50 states. But, as in Baker’s case, it doesn’t always work, especially if the recipient of the donation is not an accredited hospital or medical research center.

Natural Organic Reduction (or human composting) is only legal in 3 states.

Finally, these are all fully illegal:

• Sky burial (left as a donation for birds only, historically on a high up platform)
• Land animal donation at a closed off wildlife reserve
• Taxidermy
• Indefinite embalming (think Lenin's tomb)

Saudi Arabia

Cremation is illegal in most Muslim majority countries. But, if a national from another country dies, the legal heirs can have their body be transported out. Which is still a sad state of affairs, as Saudi Arabia employs so many poor people from abroad on working visas to work tirelessly in inhuman conditions, but won't grant families the ability to live and cremate their dead there according to their traditions.

Greece

Although the Greek church teaches that cremation conflicts with teachings on resurrection, pressure to allow the practice mounted. Cemeteries in most urban areas have become increasingly overcrowded and have begun digging up remains after three years even though, in many cases, they have not fully decomposed. The remains are then stored above ground indefinitely in ossuary boxes.

Alakiotis was 14 when he had to watch his father’s body disinterred. In 1996 he promised a friend, a Greek Buddhist, that he would ensure his remains were cremated in Greece and to spare him the indignity of exhumation. The Greek Cremation Society was established a year later.

Alakiotis wasn’t able to fully fulfill his promise to his friend. When the friend died in 2004, his remains were transported to Bulgaria and cremated there. The ashes were brought back to Athens and scattered on a mountainside. But the experience spurred Alakiotis to keep lobbying.

In 2012, a local Orthodox bishop blocked plans to build a crematorium in the rural town of Markopoulo outside Athens. The Church formally banned the performance of funeral rites for those who chose to be cremated in 2014.

The first and only cremation facility opened in 2019 in the far north of the country.

Tibet

In it's most common form historically, leaving your body as a donation for the birds was as simple as building a sturdy scaffold where there are no large predators that could climb it. And it's been practiced by many indigenous culture around the world.

In Tibet they get a bit more involved because they want the body to be fully gone with no trace, so they chop the body up into pieces to give the vultures, "then, when only the bones remain, these are broken up with mallets, ground with tsampa (barley flour with tea and yak butter, or milk) and given to the crows and hawks that have waited for the vultures to depart."

Madagascar

They practise a ritual called “famadihana,” or “the turning of the bones.”

The ritual involves exhuming the remains of relatives after several years and rewrapping them in new cloths.

Papua New Guinea

Cannibalism isn't legal in the PNG, but "the Korowai tribe of south-eastern Papua could be one of the last surviving tribes in the world engaging in cannibalism. A local cannibal cult killed and ate victims as late as 2012."

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Feel free to suggest other curious legal additions or edits.

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