A British company says it has an eco-friendly alternative to cremation: boiling bodies into dust.
In the process, called resomation, the body is encased in a silk coffin and submerged in water mixed with potassium hydroxide. It is then heated to 302 degrees Fahrenheit, which rapidly turns it into a white dust, The Mail on Sunday reported.
The process is more eco-friendly than cremation, during which a body is heated to 2,192 degrees Fahrenheit, letting off harmful fumes such as mercury, according to Resomation, the firm selling the boiling process. Instead, the company says, it is essentially a much faster version of natural decomposition.
Resomation also is affordable, costing about $600, the same as a cremation, the company said.
British authorities, who are encouraging alternatives to traditional burials for space reasons, have said they will consider any proposals.
About a thousand bodies in the United States have already been processed with resomation.
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For the decedents and their families, the decision to avoid cremation and burial of human remains is a moral imperative. The humane funeral option is to return a sterile body to the land, sans the DNA. The pure-white calcium phosphate from bones and teeth will benefit the earth or be memorialized in an urn. The toxic mercury in the teeth will be safely reclaimed, not inhaled or ingested by the living. Soft tissue, now nutrient rich gray water, can be spread upon the soil. The body is returned to the land. Survivors are spared the harm which would have befallen them had the body been burned or buried.
Burial results in 93% of the body becoming liquid. The untreated liquid human remains enter local aquifers. According to the World Health Organization, as many as 19 million Americans may become ill each year due to the parasites, viruses and bacteria in drinking water.
In the United States alone, about 3 million gallons of embalming fluid is pumped into human remains displacing the blood. The blood is not treated as a bio-hazard, as it would in any other industry. The human blood and pathogens are released untreated into sanitary sewers, exposing Iowans to health risks.
96% of a cremated body is discharged from a smokestack into our air. Annually, cremationists foul our air with close to 4 billion pounds of deceased humans. One’s survivors pay the price with respiratory problems for this inexpensive disposal method.
The Scientists for the United States Environmental Protection Agency report that over one-hundred-thousand babies are born each year in the United States, with so much in utero exposure to mercury that they are at risk of brain damage. It is inhumane to continue to harm the living and the unborn with mercury vapors, given a better option now exists.
In September 2010, CycledLife sold its first system to Jeff Edwards, owner of Edwards Funeral Services in Columbus, Ohio.