Funeral Directors Are Dissolving Bodies In The Water To Make The Earth Greener

Dhir Acharya - May 13, 2020

India has had water cremation for generations, but funeral directors have come up with a new version to dissolve bodies while helping the environment.

There are several to deal with a dead body after the funeral, some choose to bury, others choose flame cremation. However, each method has its own impacts.

In the US, cemeteries occupy about one million acres of land. Besides, each year, there are over 3,000 liters of formaldehyde buried with embalmed bodies into the ground. While over half of the people in the country choose flame cremation, this method is not better for the environment. Every year, cremations in the US release as much CO2 as 70,000 cars.

In the past few years, several funeral directors have made more investments into replacing flame cremations and traditional burials with more environment-friendly alternatives. One of the used methods is Alkaline Hydrolysis, also called water cremation.

water cremation Alkaline Hydrolysis — Funeral Directors Are Dissolving Bodies In The Water To Make The Earth Greener

India has kept the tradition of water cremations for generations, which is applied for all Hindus except for saints, children, and babies. In this traditional funeral, after conventional steps like preparing the body and visitation before the funeral, the cremation rituals take place on the Gangers River. The boy is placed on a pyre built by the family, circled three times by the karta. The karta also sprinkles holy water on the pyre, then it's set on fire and people attending the funeral will stay at the funeral until the body is entirely burned.

However, the Alkaline Hydrolysis process is much different. The Alkaline Hydrolysis involves placing the body inside a vessel and submerging it in water, which gets heated up to around 151 degrees Celsius, using potassium hydroxide as a base. The liquid remains are disposed to the water waste system.

Funeral company owner Ed Gazvoda has spent the last ten years improving this process. He was not satisfied with just flushing the liquid remains of the body down the sewer. So he came up with version 2.0 for Alkaline Hydrolysis 2.0, the upgraded process that preserves the liquid remains. He wants to donate the remains to tree nurseries and farmers so they can use it as fertilizer.

Alkaline Hydrolisis Chamber 960x570 Compressed — The body is placed inside this

Gazvoda said:

“The alternative is we would either waste the human just by burying them and taking up land or we'd have to have their particles go up in the air.”

“It'll be huge from the earth's standpoint, putting organic matter back into the earth. If you consider even just a few hundred million people did it. Thirty gallons. That's a lot of nutrients going back into the earth.”