Posted on 05/22/2017 12:58:21 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
For decades, most people arranging a funeral have faced a simple choice - burial or cremation?
But in parts of the US and Canada a third option is now available - dissolving bodies in an alkaline solution. It will arrive in the UK soon.
Its technical name is alkaline hydrolysis, but it is being marketed as “green cremation”.
So long, Robert Klink
Robert J Klink spent his life near water.
When he was growing up in the 1950s, his parents had a cabin on South Long Lake, in Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes. He learned to fish and hunt near the water’s edge.
It became a lifelong passion, and for many years he and his second wife Judi Olmsted kept a couple of cabin cruisers on the Saint Croix River. Bob would fish and shoot ducks, which he prepared and ate by himself.
Shortly before Bob’s death in March from colon and liver cancer, Olmsted approached her local funeral home, Bradshaw Celebration of Life Center in Stillwater.
She told the people there that her husband wanted to be cremated when his time came.
She was surprised to learn that Bradshaw’s offered two types of cremation: the one that everyone knows about, involving fire, and a new kind, which uses water.
A pamphlet explained that this “gentle, eco-friendly alternative to flame-based cremation” used an alkaline solution made with potassium hydroxide to reduce the body to a skeleton.
“At first, I was thinking, ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’” Olmsted says.
But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that it was the best way to go.”
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
You must admit this is a departure from your normal posting FRiend..
But informative as always!
There is a Jimmy Hoffa joke here somewhere.
Btw, teeth are problimatic.
Because carbon is a “Pollutant” to the science-minded liberals. But however “eco-friendly” this may seem to them, the carbon still goes somewhere. It doesn’t just disappear. How about having the body blown up while still alive to show their tolerance for Islam?
For you non-chemstry types, alkaline hydrolysis is also called base catylized hydrolysis, or making soap. The proteins turn into a water soluble gelatenous ooze, the fat hydrolyzes into a semisolid that can be further refined into a surfactant, with little remaining but dental enamel.
Clip....
Some funeral parlours that offer the service keep quiet about it, for fear of upsetting the community.
But market research has found that while a minority will always find the idea of alkaline hydrolysis unpleasant, if it is marketed in the right way - perhaps as green cremation, bio-cremation or water cremation - a section of the public can see its benefits.
Barbara Kemmis, the executive director of CANA, the Cremation Association of North America, relates a conversation about alkaline hydrolysis with two delegates at the recent International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association Convention in Nashville.
“This person was just so disgusted by it, didn’t even want to have the conversation,” she recalls, “and the other person was like, ‘For me, that’s like a final spa treatment.’
“I’d never heard that before, but I thought, ‘OK!’
.....
Wasn’t there an ancient Greek play about that pocess...called Adipose Rex or something...
;>)
Well this actually uses caustic potash (slightly nastier)
Get thee to a punnery!
An increased demand for that kind of process for the dearly departed should lead to increased supply of the chemicals required to achieve that end. Consequently, it more likely that the procedure for making some folks conveniently disappear should become a lot more accessible a larger number of interested parties.
there was post last week or week before about people being made into jewelry- not sure if this is any worse
To really get your atoms out there, be cremated and have the ashes spread on the Ghanges on laundry day.
Heard about this a few weeks ago. Since the liquid is flushed down the drain and into the sewer this process gives new meaning to the word “interred.”
I am one of those who don’t really care what happens to my body after I am dead. I think I am starting to rethink that.
I read about this years ago. It must be a slow news day and someone decided to re-run an old human interest story.
Everything old is new again. Theu used to lay down a heavy layer of quicklime on bodies when they buried them. This dissolved the flesh quickly and was also important for sanitation. In many parts of Europe, your grave was somewhat temporary, and after a year or so, the bones were dug up and another person was buried in the grave. At this point, the first occupant’s bones were placed on top of the new burial (which could eventually be several burials deep) and the grave was closed up again, or the bones were placed in an ossuary, a large chamber or even just a walled off outside area in the cemetery.
The giant air-tight casket and the desire to preserve the remains forever came in, for ordinary folk who didnt need to be part of a noble family pantheon, in the 19th century,
Human lutefisk.
I can see this marketed for really large people, which is becoming a problem for many crematoriums, and a larger cost for burial conventional ways as well for their family members.
I’ve heard some pretty bad stories of people who they had to wedge in the furnaces and during cremation have basically caused such a grease fire it flooded the chamber and caused some major messes outside of it.
The cost of an XXL coffin with vault is also a burden to be interred the old fashion way as well for some people who have to deal with a 700 lb. family member. (personal experience)
This or just a thick cardboard box out in the woods with a sapling planted next to you might be an alternative for our larger deceased with fiscal concerns for the family.
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