Say what?
Posted on 08/31/2011 7:08:13 AM PDT by tlb
A Glasgow-based company has installed its first commercial "alkaline hydrolysis" unit at a Florida funeral home.
The unit by Resomation Ltd is billed as a green alternative to cremation and works by dissolving the body in heated alkaline water.
The facility has been installed at the Anderson-McQueen funeral home in St Petersburg, and will be used for the first time in the coming weeks. It is hoped other units will follow in the US, Canada and Europe.
The makers claim the process produces a third less greenhouse gas than cremation, uses a seventh of the energy, and allows for the complete separation of dental amalgam for safe disposal.
"Resomation was developed in response to the public's increasing environmental concerns," company founder Sandy Sullivan told BBC News. "It gives them that working third choice, which allows them to express those concerns in a very positive and I think personal way."
The system works by submerging the body in a solution of water and potassium hydroxide which is pressurised to 10 atmospheres and heated to 180C for between two-and-a-half and three hours.
Body tissue is dissolved and the liquid poured into the municipal water system. Mr Sullivan, a biochemist by training, says tests have proven the effluent is sterile and contains no DNA, and poses no environmental risk.
The bones are then removed from the unit and processed in a "cremulator", the same machine that is used to crush bone fragments following cremation into ash. Metals including mercury and artificial joints and implants are safely recovered.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
No thanks. I saw “Troll 2” on the Chiller channel.
Wow, being turned into goop and flushed down a toilet is totally worth it if it saves 1/3 the greenhouse gas emissions. Not to mention preventing dental amalgam from contaminating our precious graveyards. And I’m sure that municipal water treatment wont mind large volumes of pH 11 liquids screwing up their activated sludge tanks.
If it ain’t brown, drink it down!
They better not do this to Keith Richards when he passes......it would take 3 days for the buzz to wear off if people drank that water.
You can tell how much a society values the living by how they treat their dead.
There is a book called Stiff by Mary Roach (highly recommended) which talks about a new green tech that’s much better than this one. Your freeze dried and then they use ultrasonic waves to break you up into small particles. The process kills all bacteria and viruses but doesn’t destroy the nutrients. The powder that’s left would be put in the ground and a new tree planted above it as your memorial. Cremation destroys most of the nutrients so this is better. No hazardous chemicals. The process is inexpensive especially compared to cremation.
The book is about how we treat dead bodies. It’s informative and some what funny. She wrote another couple books: Boink (on sex) and Packing For Mars (about space flight). In both you’ll learn a lot you didn’t know.
self-ping
If the recently deceased was a comedian, would that make the water taste funny?
So that is how you get rid of a body. And I was thinking meal worms where the way to go. Heck this process only takes a few hours. The potasium hydrox might be a little hard to come by, and the bones still need to be disposed afterwards, but hey, I can put those in a furnace first and powder what is left and then get rid of the powder.
/sarc
The problem with the wood chipper is the DNA evidence that is left behind.
OMG. "You are what you eat." What if I drink a dead liberal ??
But I though you could only do that to the body’s fatty tissues (a la “Fight Club”) What about the rest of the corpse?
What about the bones??
This is how they made dirt in the movie Water World. But I’m probably the only one here that saw it.
“What about the bones?”
Sounds like they cremate the bones and then crush them up like a usual cremation. The only difference that I am seeing, is the body is boiled of its flesh first instead of cremating the entire body. What concerns me is the dumping of the chemicals and “soup” (for lack of a better word) into the drinking supply.
Just spit 'em out!
Wait until the first time a sewer backs up into a basement or a storm forces dumping into a waterway.
They should call the company Sietch Tabr.
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