https://newrepublic.com/article/148997/fight-right-cremated-water-rise-alkaline-hydrolysis-americaSamantha Sieber’s grandfather had a traditional American burial. His body was embalmed, put in a metal casket, and laid to rest at a cemetery, where the grounds would be perpetually cared for. “It felt good to give him what he wanted,” said Sieber, who herself works in the funeral industry. But, she added, “I think my grandfather’s funeral is going to become extinct.”
In 2016, cremation became the most common method of body disposal in the U.S., overtaking entombment for the first time. This shift is often attributed to the high cost of traditional burial and the waning importance of religion. But experts also point to society’s changing views about how dead bodies should be disposed of. The spectrum of what’s morally acceptable is broadening, at the same time that the most common disposal methods are coming under scrutiny for their environmental impact. More than four million gallons of toxic embalming fluids and 20 million feet of wood are put in the ground in the U.S. every year, while a single cremation emits as much carbon dioxide as a 1,000-mile car trip. Thus, the rise in America of “green burials,” where bodies are wrapped in biodegradable material and not embalmed.
Sieber is a part of this trend, but she doesn’t want a green burial. When she dies, she told me, she wants her body to be dunked in a high-pressure chamber filled with water and lye. That water will be heated to anywhere from 200 to 300 degrees, and in six to twelve hours her flesh, blood, and muscle will dissolve. When the water is drained, all that will remain in the tank are her bones and dental fillings. If her family desires, they can have her remains crushed into ash, to be displayed or buried or scattered.
This process is known colloquially as water cremation and scientifically as alkaline hydrolysis, or aquamation. It’s the most environmentally friendly method of death care, says Sieber, the vice president of research at Bio-Response Solutions. Founded by her father in 2006, the company manufactures aquamation equipment for funeral homes and crematories throughout North America. “This has no emissions, it’s greener, it’s a clean technology to work with,” Sieber said.
But Sieber may not get her wish of being aquamated when she dies. Only 15 states allow alkaline hydrolysis for human remains, and Indiana, where Sieber lives and where Bio-Response is based, is not one of them. Casket-makers and the Catholic Church are working to make sure it stays that way.
Alkaline hydrolysis was patented in the U.S. in 1888, and the process hasn’t changed much since then. The body is submerged in a solution of about 95 percent water and 5 percent alkali—usually sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide. The liquid is heated and set at a high pressure to avoid boiling, causing the body to shed its proteins and fats. The decomposition creates a coffee-colored liquid, which contains amino acids, peptides, sugars, and salts. That liquid gets flushed down the drain, and treated like any other type of wastewater. Only bones and metal remain.
Alkaline hydrolysis was originally marketed as a way to rapidly decompose animal bodies and use their nutrients for fertilizer. It was later adopted by scientific labs to dispose of disease-contaminated bodies, like cow carcasses infected by mad cow disease in the 1990s. Its commercial use for animals began in the early 2000s, Seiber said, as grieving pet owners sought a sentimental disposal option that didn’t require an expensive burial or involve burning Fido to ashes.
In addition to its gentleness and cost (aquamation for dogs runs anywhere from $150 to $400, while cremation is around $100), veterinarians and pet funeral homes began to market aquamation’s environmental benefits. “Unlike cremation, there are no toxic emissions and no contribution to greenhouse gases,” wrote Jerry Shevik, owner of Peaceful Pets Aquamation in California. “It has a carbon footprint that is only one-tenth of what fire-based cremation produces.” Roughly the same is true for human aquamation, which, according to Staudt’s book, “requires about 90 kwh of electricity, resulting in one quarter the carbon emissions of cremation, consuming one-eighth the energy, while costing the consumer roughly the same amount as cremation.” Environmental issues can arise if the water poured down the drain after a liquid cremation has a pH level above local regulations. If that happens, however, funeral homes can easily treat the water with carbon dioxide before releasing it.
The growing use of aquamation for pets created more demand for human use. Minnesota was the first state to legalize alkaline hydrolysis for humans in 2003, and other states eventually followed. Oregon and Maine passed bills in 2009; Florida and Kansas in 2010. Ten more states followed, the most recent being California, which passed a bill last yearofficially deeming aquamation a type of cremation. Funeral homes will be allowed to offer it beginning in 2020.
Sieber’s business isn’t suffering from the fact that the process isn’t legal in every U.S. state. “We’re selling at the pace we can grow right now,” she said. “It wouldn’t help us if every state was approved.”
But her family did suffer personally. In March of 2013, two of her grandparents died just one day apart from each other. Each had wanted to be aquamated. Sieber’s family had planned to use the closest funeral home that provided the service—a few hundred miles away, across the state border in Illinois. But the shock of losing two grandparents at once was too much to handle the logistics. “There was so much grief,” Sieber said. “We couldn’t get it done.”
Angered by their inability to fulfill their loved ones’ wishes, Sieber’s family launched a lobbying effort to get aquamation legalized in Indiana. And after more than a year and $40,000 spent, Sieber said they had gathered enough votes for a bill to pass. When their aquamation legalization bill came to the floor of the state House of Representatives, however, it was derailed by a gruesome speech by a lawmaker who also happened to be a casket-maker.
Representative Dick Hamm’s speech made national news that day, and not only because of his business interest in keeping human aquamation illegal in Indiana. “We’re going to put [dead bodies] in acid and just let them dissolve away and then we’re going to let them run down the drain out into the sewers and whatever,” Hamm said, comparing the process to “flushing” a loved one. This wasn’t accurate. Aquamation uses lye, not acid, and similar fluids are flushed down the drain during the embalming process. But Hamm’s hyperbole was effective. Though he was the only lawmaker to speak against the bill, it failed in a 34-59 vote.
The idea that aquamation is unnatural or gross or even immoral has impeded its adoption in other states. A bill to re-legalize it in New Hampshire, where it had been legal for two years before being repealed, was rejected in 2009 after lawmakers gave speeches similar to Hamm’s. “I don’t want to send a loved one to be used as fertilizer or sent down the drain to a sewer treatment plant,” Republican John Cebrowski said. His Republican colleague Mike Kappler added that “he didn’t want to drive by a sewage lagoon where a relative’s liquid remains would wind up.”
The Catholic Church of New Hampshire came out against that bill as well, and testified against later efforts to re-legalize aquamation in the state in 2013 and 2014. Each testimony said alkaline hydrolysis “fails to provide New Hampshire Citizens with the reverence and respect they should receive at the end of their lives.”
But those who choose aquamation for their loved ones overwhelmingly do so because they believe it’s a kinder way to treat a body, said Philip Olson, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech and a death studies expert. “Embalming is invasive and violent, and so is fire,” he said. But alkaline hydrolysis, he said, is more like a warm bath. “That’s becoming a more prominent value in American death care, the idea of gentleness,” he said. “That’s why we’ve seen such growth in the home funeral movement—the idea of using your hands is more intimate, of having contact with the body, not mediating your contact through instruments which are hard and cold.”
The environmental benefits of aquamation are less of a motivating factor. “We thought families would want this because it’s more eco-friendly,” Sieber said. “They like that, but it’s not why they’re choosing it.” That may be a good thing, because alkaline hydrolysis is not an environmental panacea. Its widespread adoption could increase production at industrial chlor-alkali plants, which are known to emit mercury and other pollutants. The process also uses about 300 gallons of water per body, or three times as much as the average person uses in a day. And while replacing cremation with aquamation would have some climate benefits, they wouldn’t be as huge as, say, getting rid of coal-fired power plants—which is perhaps why there are no large environmental advocacy campaigns to change the death care industry.
Olson sees a more existential value in greening up death care. “The funeral industry has always been about making your body immune to nature, preserving yourself in spite of it,” he said. Processes like aquamation require an acceptance of becoming part of it. “It’s new to think about bodies that way, as a kind of eco-product,” he said. “It demonstrates a shift in how people are thinking about our relationship to the natural world.” If more people respect the planet in death, it bodes well for how they’ll treat it while they’re still alive.
Science The Fight for the Right to Be Cremated by Water
- Thread starter neger psykolog
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- Feb 1, 2015
I'm not surprised the Papists are against this newfangled liquid cremation. Once it goes down the drain, you can't exactly exhume a couple liters of corpse-fluid from the water treatment plant to stand trial for heresy like you can with a good old-fashioned stiff in a coffin.
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- Dec 28, 2014
You mean like Pope Formosus?
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- Jul 29, 2016
I don't know why they're so pissed off about bodies being "used as fertilizer" or whatever. Dead people giving new life to plants is kinda wholesome.
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- Jul 1, 2017
I agree with those lawmakers this practice is pretty gross, but it's ridiculous the government can ban it. If someone wants to have their body dissolved when they die, that's their choice. Probably the only reason government gets involved is the fact funeral homes are often associated with local politics and casket companies like Dick Hamm's.
VoreDoggy
kiwifarms.net
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- Feb 9, 2018
The actual answer is that there is a literal belief in bodily resurrection, which can't really happen if you've been melted in lye.
RadicalCentrist
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- Dec 15, 2017
I think I would prefer the "Green Funeral" (Really just the same old way we've done funerals until the 20th century.) Staring at a urn is so impersonal, what's the point? If you don't believe in the Jesus fella, just skip the whole funeral thing entirely, don't half ass it.
Also the gubmint has no business regulating what can be done with a body, except in the case of suspected foul play. Cremating is a great way to cover your tracks as a murderer, incidentally.
Also the gubmint has no business regulating what can be done with a body, except in the case of suspected foul play. Cremating is a great way to cover your tracks as a murderer, incidentally.
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- Feb 4, 2018
People should be allowed to do whatever they want with their bodies. As long as they aren't putting the public at risk it should be free reign.
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I'll just call this the cartel treatment since this is how they get rid of bodies.
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I'll just call this the cartel treatment since this is how they get rid of bodies.
Zaryiu
kiwifarms.net
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How does water cremation even works? I heard there was in Florida (Years ago) a liquefaction method that turns the corpse into a brown sludge (and yes since it was Florida the spokesman said they were pumping said sludge into the municipal reserves of water). Is this a similar process?
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- Nov 19, 2017
yeah people should be allowed to totally degenerate if they please
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- Jun 4, 2018
That's only among the autists (which admittedly, there's quite a few). I think the accepted interpretation is that your resurrection will be in a new body.
(I'm hoping for one with a bigger dick, myself, but hey.)
Looking at the link from the original story, the church's complaint is that they're concerned the liquified remains won't be treated with respect (i.e., flushed down into the sewer system). There's always some asshole, I expect, who'd try to cut corners, after all.
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- Jun 2, 2015
Considering that this is a environmentally friendly alternative, and how it leaves only the bone and dental works, I don’t see why this isn’t supported, other than “it’s gross!” Death itself is horrific and gross, and as long as they’re not trying to feed their bodies to people (or something equally horrific), they should be able to have this done.
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The dead should lie in the ground, embalmed and preserved for future scientists/Raptor Jesus to poke.
Cremation is simply just cheaper since you don't have to pay a tax to keep your ancestors from being exhumed and thrown out to rot. It is not pretty... but if you don't have a lot of kids to pay the due of your dead, it may be a safer bet.
Cremation is simply just cheaper since you don't have to pay a tax to keep your ancestors from being exhumed and thrown out to rot. It is not pretty... but if you don't have a lot of kids to pay the due of your dead, it may be a safer bet.
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- Jun 9, 2016
i plan on setting enough money aside to be turned into a weapons-grade laser diode focusing lens (basically optical glass lens with impurities derived from my ashes).
you'd figure more people would have some imagination with what they want to be done to their body after they're passing - and the rising costs and environmental impacts are no small reason to cultivate that sort of creativity.
you'd figure more people would have some imagination with what they want to be done to their body after they're passing - and the rising costs and environmental impacts are no small reason to cultivate that sort of creativity.
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I've known about this for a while because of the Ask A Mortician Youtube channel. I think the more the media talks about this, the more states and provinces will legalize it and funeral homes offer it. There is a pet aquacrematory in the US called Resting Waters, which I think is a really cute name.
Actually, it's been popular since the US civil war era to allow the bodies of soldiers to be transported long-distance to their grieving families. It's true that natural burial was conventional for a lot longer than modern embalming. I think urns can be personal. You don't have to scatter them, you can keep them in your room. There are even teddy bear urns that people can hug. They're especially popular for parents of dead children.
If you wanted to preserve some of their DNA you could always save some hair, a nail clipping etc. and put it in the urn as well. The cremation can be done after an open casket funeral. Every loved one I have who has died so far did that. I think they should make people do this just in case there is ever a serial killer who went undetected.
There was a serial killer nurse recently in Ontario, Canada who got away with it for years. She was ODing elderly people on insulin. The bodies were ordered to be exhumed to look for evidence of her doing this but most of them were cremated. This will be something the legal system will have to deal with more as more Boomers die who don't have a problem with cremation. Sorry to "actually" you this is one of my autistic special interests.
If you wanted to preserve some of their DNA you could always save some hair, a nail clipping etc. and put it in the urn as well. The cremation can be done after an open casket funeral. Every loved one I have who has died so far did that. I think they should make people do this just in case there is ever a serial killer who went undetected.
There was a serial killer nurse recently in Ontario, Canada who got away with it for years. She was ODing elderly people on insulin. The bodies were ordered to be exhumed to look for evidence of her doing this but most of them were cremated. This will be something the legal system will have to deal with more as more Boomers die who don't have a problem with cremation. Sorry to "actually" you this is one of my autistic special interests.
How is it degenerate? It's just another option people can have for their loved ones.
Flushing them down the sewer is actual standard procedure for this type of cremation. By the time the process has been completed, the bones preserved and the body dissolved, the sludge is pretty sanitary so it doesn't put anyone at danger by going down the drain.
The problem I have is when big, powerful, rich organizations like the Catholic Church actually forbid this for their followers and lobby against this option being legal and available. It seems hypocritical to me that they were against cremation for so long, then they finally allowed it but they won't allow this which has the same results for a family which is ash for an urn. Well technically it's powdered bone.
In normal cremation, all of a person's blood goes down the drain. It really comes down to what a person is personally comfortable with. Religious people are going to have to decide for themselves if this is OK with their beliefs.
The problem I have is when big, powerful, rich organizations like the Catholic Church actually forbid this for their followers and lobby against this option being legal and available. It seems hypocritical to me that they were against cremation for so long, then they finally allowed it but they won't allow this which has the same results for a family which is ash for an urn. Well technically it's powdered bone.
There's a decent Wiki article on it which explains the process in depth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaline_hydrolysis_(body_disposal)#Process
Dumping the sludge into the sewer system is a normal part of it but all the viruses and things that could hurt living beings have been killed. It's been broken down into the basic chemical constituents of sugars, amino acids etc.
Dumping the sludge into the sewer system is a normal part of it but all the viruses and things that could hurt living beings have been killed. It's been broken down into the basic chemical constituents of sugars, amino acids etc.
Embalming today isn't like ancient mummies that can exist for thousands of years. Modern embalming only delays decomposition for about a month. The body in a typical modern burial goes in a casket or coffin and into a burial vault. This actually makes the body eventually turn into sludge. Modern embalming is only meant to preserve the body long enough for an open casket and give everyone a chance to get to the funeral and say goodbye.
There lots of random stuff you can do with your remains. You can have them made into an artificial reef and put into the ocean, into a diamond that can be worn as jewelry, fireworks, glass work, made into a vinyl, made into a sex toy 
and that is just with cremains.
and that is just with cremains.
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- Jun 9, 2016
many places can turn your ashes into glass - it takes refinement and cash to churn out something optically viable enough to focus a laser beam, that's all. search for "cremation glass."You can do that? Linkage? I am intrigued
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- Nov 19, 2017
i was joke
in theory aquamation sounds chill and totally green
but it just seems like a rlly gimmicky way of disposing bodies
idk touchy subject
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- Jul 17, 2016
I never thought about it that way but it is a fair point. It's definitely very modern. It never existed throughout most of history because they didn't have the technology to support it. Burying and cremation has existed for very long, even with earlier hominids. Secular people will naturally be more open to aquamation I think because they don't have any religious traditions they need to fulfill.