Water Cremation

A September 16, 2010 article in The Economist about the rise of "green funerals" listed a number of changes happening in the moribund funeral industry, among them shared hearses, using home-grown flowers at funerals, and coffins made from cardboard.

Along with such low-tech innovations, new technologies such as "water cremation" or alkaline hydrolysis, where a corpse is placed into a heated solution of water and potassium hydroxide, and in a few hours dissolves into an inorganic liquid which can be used as fertilizer and a white ash-like residue, are becoming  commercially sustainable.

"Aquamation Industries, an Australian company, opened a water-cremation facility in Queensland last month. Resomation, a British firm, will install equipment in Florida by the year-end. Its founder, Sandy Sullivan [top, left, between engineering director Craig Sinclair and the company's brand-new Resomator S750 water-cremation tank], says conventional cremation produces four times as much CO2 as does this process."

Then there's freeze-drying, where "The body is freeze-dried in liquid nitrogen, then vibrated so that it dissolves into a fine powder. Further processes evaporate water and remove things like mercury. The residue can be put into a shallow grave and turns to mulch in about a year. Observers reckon that the Swedish company which developed the idea, Promessa, has promised much and delivered little. But Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak, its founder, says that franchises are now in place in South Korea and Britain, and that the need for crematoria to comply with mercury-abatement rules could also prompt orders in Sweden itself."