What is water, an alternative promoted as “greener” than cremation

Martin Woolridge 3 years ago 2 min read

Drafting
BBC News World

49 minutes

Flowers on Archbishop Desmond Tutu's coffin — caption,

Flowers on Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s coffin during the state funeral, which was held in Cape Town, on January 1.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, hero of the struggle against apartheid and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who died on December 26, requested that his body be drowned.

It was “what I aspired to as an environmental activist,” said Reverend Michael Widder.

It is that promoters present this procedure as a “more ecological” alternative to cremation.

Technology Turning corpses to ashes, as with cremation, but without the need for cremation.

According to UK-based Resomation, an “independent environmental analysis” showed that using burning water instead of flames “reduced greenhouse gas emissions from that funeral by about 35%”.

For its part, Bio-Response, which specializes in the process in the United States, indicated that this technology reduces energy use by “90% compared to burning with a flame.”

The scientific name for the process is . alkaline hydrolysis, including body weight and then heated to 150 ° C in a mixture of potassium hydroxide and water for 90 minutes.

this is Dissolves body tissues, leaving only the bones, which are then rinsed at 120°C, dried and crushed using a machine called a cremation machine.

Once all of these steps have been completed, the remains can be buried or scattered according to the deceased’s wish, just as would be done in normal cremation.

some countries

This technology mimics the naturally occurring alkaline hydrolysis process when the body decomposes, only in this case the decomposition occurring over a period of up to 20 years within Fewhours.

image source, Getty Images

Aquamation has been in use for several years, but only in some countries.

In 2011, for example, we at BBC Mundo reported on the installation of the first commercial alkaline hydrolysis machine in a funeral home in Florida, USA:

In 2014, the article was written by Philip Olson, a technology ethicist at Virginia Tech Flow and Bones: The Funeral of Alkaline Hydrolysis in the United States (“Funeral alkaline hydrolysis in the United States”) in the trade journal: Science, technology and human values.

He noted that “supporters focus on the environmental benefits of alkaline hydrolysis in cremation and burial, aligning the technology with the ‘green burial’ movement.”

The author referred to this technique in the United States It began to be used in the nineties by Albany Medical College researchers who were looking for an “effective and inexpensive method for the disposal of experimental animal remains that contain low-level radioactive isotopes”.

In 2014, the procedure was legal in eight US states, and according to the researcher, there were sectors vigorously opposed for that technology.