Is this Swedish town that's routing heat from its crematorium to local homes morbid or brilliant? Let's just call them brilliantly morbid.
Posted on 12/31/2008 1:24:33 PM PST by MyTwoCopperCoins
Is this Swedish town that's routing heat from its crematorium to local homes morbid or brilliant? Let's just call them brilliantly morbid.
The town of Halmstad came up with the idea when trying to curb the amount of smoke emitted from the crematorium.
It was when we were discussing all these environmental issues that we started thinking about the energy that is used in the cremations and realised that instead of all that heat just going up into the air, we could make use of it somehow. It was just rising into the skies for nothing," said Lennart Andersson, the director of the cemetery in the town of Halmstad.
It might sound kind of gross, but if you were suddenly having your house heated for free this winter I don't think you'd complain that much.
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
I do not feel guilty enough about keeping warm to use Soylent Heat - Yee-gads!
Can I throw up now
Cremation wastes a heck of a lot of energy. Burial wastes a lot of space. So why not use another alternative?
When natural history museums want to clean the carcass of a dead animal, they use insects to do it. They are very thorough and leave clean, dry bones. So why not use insects to clean human cadavers?
Don’t be squeamish about it, since that is essentially what is being done with burial, but slower and with “ickier” insects.
In this case, the cadaver would be put in a warm chamber with one or more type of insect that would rapidly, within a week or two, reduce it to just bones and artificial parts. If the cadaver contained no substantial amount of toxins or poisons, then the insects could be compressed into food pellets for zoo animals. Otherwise, they could be disposed of as a small amount of ordinary or toxic waste.
The bones could either be interred, using only a fraction of the space needed for an entire body, or they could be burned, using much less fuel, to provide ashes for an urn.
In either case it would be far cleaner and less expensive than how things are currently done.
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