Death Is Inevitable. A New Kind of Cremation Is Trying to Make It Sustainable.
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An alternative human burial method, known as alkaline hydrolysis or ‘water cremation,’ has started to gain traction in recent years.
Alkaline hydrolysis is marketed as a greener, cleaner form of cremation that breaks the body down into its fundamental building blocks using a very high-pH solution.
The process results in a sterile liquid that can be easily disposed of, and embrittled bones that can be returned to loved ones as “ash.”
If you’re in a mob movie or mystery TV show and you have to get rid of a body, one of your top options is probably going to be to find a large container of acid and chuck the unfortunate victim in there for a few days until they’re all dissolved away. No body, no crime on the silver screen.
In real life, you hopefully will never need to get rid of an incriminating body. But unfortunately, dealing with deceased human bodies in some capacity is something that almost everyone has to go through at least once in their lives. When a loved one passes away, one of the first questions you have to answer is: what are we going to do with the body?
For a long time, there have been two main options on the table to address that problem—burial and cremation. But in recent years, alternative forms of burial have begun to enter the post-mortem scene. And fascinatingly, one of these is a bit of a cousin to the Tony Soprano-style acid disposal. They just use a base from all the way at the other end of the pH scale instead.
This process is known as alkaline hydrolysis, or ‘water cremation,’ and it’s currently in the headlines because officials are trying to get it approved as a legal form of burial in the state of Indiana. The process is already legal in several states, and is being marketed as a more environmentally friendly approach to cremation—one that uses significantly less energy and produces significantly less pollution.
The idea behind alkaline hydrolysis is to basically speed nature along. When we die, unless they are preserved in some way, our bodies slowly break down into their basic components over time. The muscle tissue, organs, skin, and everything else that makes up a human body slowly become things like peptides and amino acids, with the bones staying in tact the longest.
Alkaline hydrolysis speeds that up. A body is placed into a chamber filled with a circulating solution of 95 percent water and 5 percent strong base (either potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide), and the very basic solution goes to work on whatever it is surrounding. The soft tissues of the body are broken down into sugars, salts, amino acids, peptides, and soaps—yes, soaps, which form when a fat and a base interact through a process called saponification—and the bones are made brittle.
Because the resulting liquid solution—known as effluent—is completely sterile, contains no DNA, and is not at all harmful, it can just be discharged from the chamber like regular wastewater and allowed to return to the local water system. The bones are then ground into a powder and returned to the loved ones of the deceased, much like the ashes of someone who was cremated in fire would be.
It might sound like a very foreign concept to many, and while it’s not exactly a mainstream burial option, it is legal in over half of U.S. states. Legality, though, does not necessarily imply acceptance. “I appreciate trying to create options for consumers,” Paul St. Pierre, a funeral director and representative for the Cremation Society of Indiana, told IndyStar, “but I don’t believe Indiana is ready to boil their loved ones.”
But there are two sides to every coin, and those in favor of largely seem to cite two reasons why they stand where they do on the issue: options and environmentalism. For some, having as many choices as possible to offer families in extremely trying times in a huge priority. And for others, it’s just a better way to dispose of our dead without harming the world around us.
Cremation is known to be a hugely polluting process, and releases an estimated 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, according to National Geographic. And burial isn’t much better on the pollution front. For example, according to an article from Smithsonian Magazine, the U.S. alone buries approximately 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde with our dead every single year.
Alkaline hydrolysis can break down chemicals like formaldehyde, does not release greenhouse gas, and uses an estimated 10 percent of the energy used by traditional flame cremation. It does use a significant amount of water—400 gallons per cremation, according to IndyStar—so it’s not perfectly green, but it’s a start.
“We’re going back to the building blocks of protein, and it’s going to create a byproduct that is healthy for the environment,” funeral director Morris Pearson, who performs these water cremations in Oregon, told Smithsonian Magazine. He added that consumers tend to initially “react emotionally and not intellectually. And if you get them to reason with it, most people understand that [alkaline hydrolysis is] a way cleaner and way better process [than flame cremation or casketed burial]. I mean, they just come to that conclusion on their own.”
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