Aquamation: A Greener Alternative to Cremation?

[BridgeTheGap]

In Western societies, disposing of a dead body has come down to two choices — there's burial, and there's cremation. Occasionally, a corpse is donated to science, but even those remains usually make their way to the crematorium in the end.

But since climate change has piqued the world's environmental awareness, it has become clear that death, despite being the most natural of processes, is bad for the environment. Coffins, most of which are made from non-biodegradable chipboard, take up valuable land space. Even when coffins are biodegradable, embalming liquid, which often contains carcinogenic formaldehyde, can leak into the soil. Cremation, during which remains are burned at 850 degrees Celsius (1,562 F), comes with its own problems. According to the research of Professor Roger Short from the University of Melbourne, the process can create up to 160 kilograms (353 lbs.) of greenhouse gases per corpse, including the remains of the coffin.

In Australia, one company has recently started to sell a greener alternative. Aquamation Industries claims to be the first in the world to offer its unique answer to a cheaper, more carbon-neutral method of body disposal. Aquamation employs a process called alkaline hydrolysis, in which a body is placed in a stainless steel vat containing a 93-degree Centigrade, potassium hydroxide and water solution for four hours until all that remains is the skeleton. The bones, which are soft at that point, are then crushed, and presented to family. The residual liquid contains no DNA and the procedure only uses between 5% and 10% of the energy that cremation uses, says John Humphries, a former funeral-home director who is now the chief executive of Aquamation Industries, which launched its services in August. According to Humphries, Aquamation accelerates the processes that occur in nature. Even the residual liquid can be recycled: Humphries measures the pH after the procedure is completed. If it's deemed too high in alkalinity he adds vinegar or citric acid to it afterwards. By that time, he says it's safe enough to pour on the rose bushes.

David Brynn Hibbert, a professor of analytical chemistry at the University of New South Wales, had a different interpretation of the process. "Potassium hydroxide is similar to the stuff you use to clean the oven. It has that soapy feel that strips your fingerprints if you accidentally get it on your hands. If you can imagine the way that it dissolves leftover cooking fats, well, the solution does the same thing with a human body." Hibbert added that the remaining liquid would have to be neutralized to be poured over living plants. "It might be too high in alkalinity initially, but the right amount of vinegar or citric acid would correct that."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2022206,00.html#ixzz117GCbQU8

[Tuesday Afternoon]

1. interesting. K&R and bkmrkd. thanks.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. I am intrigued by the true ecological "burial" where one's body is left in the

wilderness for carnivores to consume. No fire, no waste of land, but rather, transformation and literally return to the earth.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. There was an interesting programme about Indian vultures on British TV a few weeks ago

There had been a drastic decline in their numbers, which had further ecological problems (feral dogs increased in number, eating the corpses such as cattle from dumps which vultures had been eating; this increased the number of rabies cases and also the leopards coming into human settlements to feed on the dogs, which also increased the attacks on children by leopards).

The decline in vultures was of great concern to the Parsis, whose traditional method of burial is 'sky burial' - ie leaving the body on a tower for vultures to eat. It's not a bad method of disposal - vultures are well adapted to eating carcasses, and they tend not to pass on any human diseases in their faeces, unlike mammalian scavengers, so, even in populated areas, it's not a health problem. But the Parsis found the vultures just weren't around any more.

It turned out to be an anti-inflammatory drug Diclofenac, which is widely used for cattle in India (where the Hindus are meant to take care of their cattle, which can mean easing their pain into old age, rather than killing them as other cultures might do) as well as humans. It gives the vultures renal failure when they eat carrion with it in. So the Parsis all stopped using the drug, of course, but since the vultures frequent both their 'towers of silence' and the dumps with cattle corpses, that on its own wasn't enough. So the Indian government is phasing out the use of Diclofenac in animals.

Anyway, the point of this was to talk about one method of ecological body disposal that had worked OK for one community until an unexpected drug side-effect, and to point out that we have to consider the effect of the extra carrion on the scavenger population, and the ecological system they live in. If you have a large wilderness, then you can distribute it widely (though there's the fuel needed to get there and back, of course), but before it becomes a common practice, someone would need to work out the possible effects on everything.

[no_hypocrisy]

8. I'm a prime candidate. I'm free of pharmaceuticals (so far).

[FSogol]

3. Damn. I thought Aquamation would give me the powers of Aquaman.

:shrug:

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Interesting, but I think the guys advocating green burial are probably right

In Australia, Aquamation has had a mixed response from scientists. Barry Brook, an environmental scientist from the University of Adelaide, says that any step taken toward saving the environment is a positive one. However, Short, who spoke out against cremation in 2008, is more ambivalent: "I just don't see why it would be better than a natural <"i.e., free of embalming with a biodegradable coffin or a cloth shroud with biodegradable lining"> burial. You can be buried in a forest for the cost of almost nothing, and the trees would sequester carbon dioxide from the environment for years and years."

Kevin Hartley, spokesperson for the Natural Earth Burial Society in South Australia, advocates more natural burials, but acknowledges that land availability is problematic. "Because it has to be done within the constraints of the existing funeral industry it doesn't work out to be that cheap," he says. Yet he asserts that if he could acquire a plot of land and manage it his way, he could theoretically bury 10,000 people per hectare. "We could keep burying Australians this way for the next 500 years."

The energy needed to dispose of a body safely should be very little - have a hole of a reasonable depth, and as long as there isn't a fast flow of water through that earth straight into another use (slow is OK), you're fine. Set yourself up to dig and fill the hole efficiently (eg dig one hole large enough for several bodies at once, and then just fill it in one at a time), and it's simple, without need for heat or chemicals. But we're still oriented towards having a physical object at a service (a coffin, the cremated remains etc.), and individual horizontal burial plots (10,000 people per hectare is 1 per square metre - I wonder if he'd use vertical burial).

[davidinalameda]

6. no offense

and I know this sounds very childish but this has to be the grossest thread I've ever seen on DU in all my time on here

just the idea of being dissolved gives me major creeps

[phantom power]

7. wasn't this a Columbo episode?

back in the day

[Dogmudgeon]

9. Back during the Energy Crisis

... of the 1970s.

:evilgrin:

--d!

[AlecBGreen]

10. interesting process

This part is bunk. Cremation "...can create up to 160 kilograms (353 lbs.) of greenhouse gases per corpse" Assuming they are meaning carbon dioxide, so what? Thats less then the CO2 emitted by burning one 20-gallon tank of gas. Going green is important but there are so many shysters out there trying to make a buck off peoples feelings of guilt.

[hunter]

11. I can't believe there's no Soylent Green reference yet...

"It's People!" *

[petronius]

12. If this is going to catch on, I really think they'll need to find a fuzzier and

more euphemistic way to describe it. Cremation seems 'clean', although perhaps that's just because were used to it, but I think the chemical angle will be very off-putting. Even the name Aquamation sounds too much like a lawn fertilizer.

Personally, I would prefer a totally natural disposal, preferably at sea. Just weight me down with some rocks and drop me in a few hundred feet of water...