BioCremation in Europe

Biocremation is a relatively new idea. There have been many articles published on the web and in the news that suggest Alkaline Hydrolysis also being referred to as Biocremation has been used for a while for human disposition. I have not found anything that suggests that it has been used for anything other than a way to process animal carcases. Remember the mad cow epidemic in Britain in the 1990′s? Thats how they disposed of the millions of cows.

From The Times Online – They didn’t have this kind of problem in Ancient Egypt. As Britain prepares to queue to see the spectacular tomb treasures of the boy king Tutankhamun in London next week, a less heavily publicised funerary gathering will convene in less mysterious and romantic circumstances – in Gateshead.

Our burial and cremation bosses are meeting for their annual conference to discuss a delicate and increasingly urgent question: what to do with all our dead bodies.

Mummification, the arcane craft of preserving defunct Pharaohs, won’t be on the agenda. But an equally odd-sounding approach will: a way of dissolving humans that was developed for disposing of diseased cattle. Technology may take us from Cairo to cows.

We are in dire need of answers. Traditional burials are in trouble because Britain is rapidly running out of cemetery land. In Greater London, half the graveyards are full and the remaining capacity is disappearing at a rate of 10,000 new interments a year. Crematoriums, meanwhile, face mounting criticism for their high energy consumption and harmful emissions. By law they must halve the amount of mercury they funnel skywards by 2012. At the moment 16 per cent of the country’s mercury emissions come from dead people’s vaporised dentistry. Expensive “scrubbing” equipment is needed for the chimneys, but not all crematoriums can accommodate it.

The body is dissolved in an alkali solution

New technology may provide radical alternatives. The front-runner under discussion at the Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities’ (FBCA) conference is called “resomation”. In layman’s terms, it is an accelerated form of natural decomposition. The body is immersed in an alkali solution of potash lye, which is heated to about 160C in a pressurised submarine-shaped steel chamber. Two hours later, you have a watery solution that can be safely poured into the earth – and white calcium phosphate, the bone residue, that can be given to mourners like cremation ash. Dental mercury is filtered out. “Scientifically, the process involved is called alkaline hydrolysis,” explains Sandy Sullivan, an affable Scot who is pioneering the technique in Britain. “When human tissues are built, elements get bound together by the removal of water molecules. Hydrolysis puts the water back in – and unzips the tissue molecules.” Sullivan, the managing director of Resomation, the company behind the technique, is presenting his work to the conference jointly with the prestigious US Mayo Clinic, which has been using it for 18 months to deal with the remains of people who donated their bodies to medical research. “For the past decade it has been used in Florida for the batch disposal of the remains of bodies donated for research. Mayo has adopted the same process but in a more mourner-friendly manner – one body at a time, with the body entering the chamber horizontally, just like cremation,” says Sullivan.

The basic process has been used with animals since the early 1990s. Sullivan originally worked with a company that developed it for cows that had BSE or had been used for anthrax or smallpox vaccines, as it sterilises as well as decomposes. Now he says his machine is attracting interest and putative orders from America, Canada and “three or four places in Britain”.

For the ceremony, the body is placed in a reusable casket that resembles a traditional coffin. This covers an inner coffin made of silk on a metal frame. This liner is put into the chamber and the silk dissolves. “The majority of the Resomators will be installed alongside cremators as an eco-friendly alternative method,” says Sullivan.

The City of London Crematorium is interested in the technology. Dr Ian Hussain, its director, says: “I’d take one tomorrow. It seems a great invention, but first it must be approved by our board members. One snag is that the funeral directors might be unhappy about not being able to sell mourners coffins.” Duncan McCallum, the secretary of the FBCA, agrees that resomation sounds promising. “It isn’t releasing emissions into the air and it’s not doing the same damage as a burial. It seems to have a lot going for it.”

Related posts:

1. Funeral Plans – Green Cremation Urns