In fact, how to dispose of a dead sea turtle is not so straightforward. In the past, I have tried (unsuccessfully) to drop them at sea. Burying the carcasses at the beach is one way of doing it, but you need to ensure that the hole is deep enough so that a beach visitor doesn't mistakenly hit a turtle shell when building a sand castle. Digging deep holes on the beach is not always possible, especially in the summer when the beach is full of visitors. The current best-available option for stranded turtles in NC is to dispose of them in a forested area that is off-limits to the public, where the carcasses can decompose without the threat of someone poking around, looking for souvenir turtle skull. In the past eight years, perhaps >800 carcasses have been disposed of in this way. The initial forest location was changed, because a new walking trail was established that passed next to the disposal area. The forest is dense enough that no hiker would know there were turtle bones there, unless they strayed from the walking path. The current location (photo above) is unlikely to "go public" in the near future, although one could imagine what a future anthropologist might think when s/he finds a pile of old turtle bones in the forest...