Category: Going Green

Posted on

Inside the warehouse that builds machines to liquify dead bodies

— Most funeral practices leave pollution behind. Can aquamation change that?

Based in Danville, Indiana, Bio-Response Solutions builds alkaline hydrolysis machines that fit small pets (seen here) to adult humans.

By

Hannah Czerwinski’s office desk isn’t decorated like most. Between pictures of her baby and papers rest vials of perfectly clean, bright white bones.

“This is Dougie,” she says, holding up a tiny glass jar of bearded dragon remnants.

Dougie is just one of many dead animals in Czerwinski’s office. Her shelves are lined with glass jars of sharp canine and cat teeth, fine powdery ground-up bones, and even delicate bat bones. They’ve all been picked clean as if their bodies had been scavenged by vultures and then bleached like a sand dollar. They look like they could turn to dust from one touch.

Czerwinski is one of around 20 employees at Bio-Response Solutions, the leading manufacturer of alkaline hydrolysis equipment worldwide. This equipment is used to reduce deceased humans and animals to liquid and ash, a method that is less energy intensive and polluting than cremation. The company is not an active funeral home and legally can’t process humans, but it does use deceased animals to show potential buyers how the equipment works. When her lizard companion passed away a few years ago, Czerwinski knew what to do. After he died, Dougie’s body was placed in one of Bio-Response’s pet systems and turned into liquid until all that remained were the bones that sit next to Czerwinski’s computer.

Tucked away in an industrial park 40 minutes outside of Indianapolis, Bio-Response is the world’s biggest manufacturer of machines that liquefy bodies with water. They ship about 100 chambers each year across the globe—a mixture of pet and human machines—to provide a more sustainable, less fuel-intensive alternative to cremation.

This process may sound macabre, but it’s not brand new. It is, however, becoming more attractive as people search for more environmentally sound death options. Alkaline hydrolysis, which Bio-Response calls aquamation, is just one in a growing list of options for consumers concerned about how their funerals may impact the environment. Other options include eco-burials, body composting, and mushroom mycelium suits. And while alkaline hydrolysis may not be talked about as frequently as the other, it’s legal in far more places, including about half of all US states for humans.

The steps are a bit different for animals like Dougie. While the human machines can only treat one body at a time, in the pet machines, multiple small bodies can be treated simultaneously because the animals are separated by metal walls, so their bones don’t get mixed up. The machine is then filled with a mixture of hot water and a caustic alkali (a liquid or solid version of sodium and potassium hydroxides). Together, the two break down the body until all that is left are bones.

Bio-Response Solutions staff member puts pet remains into an alkaline hydrolysis machine
A staff member treats the remains of a family pet. Alkaline hydrolysis is legal for animals in Indiana.

Alkaline hydrolysis can sound scary, hence why it goes by so many names: aquamation and resomation being the two most popular. But really, the whole process can be understood by going back to basic chemistry. Think of a pH chart you might have seen on a science classroom wall. On one side, starting from zero, are acidic substances like lemon juice and vinegar. In the middle, at seven, is water, a purely neutral liquid. Then on the other side, things get basic. Ending at 14 are alkaline substances. Chemically, alkaline substances are the opposite of acids, but they, too, can break down organic compounds.

Crematorium owner and Bio-Response machine user Philip Flores uses potassium hydroxide as his alkali, which is just a type of lye used in soap making. “It’s a salt that helps create alkalinity when mixed with water,” he says. “So when you have the warm and gentle flow of water introduced with this alkalinity, what happens is, aside from accelerating the decomposition process, it breaks down anything that’s organic, leaving behind the inorganic, which would be the entire skeletal structure.”

In as little as 16 hours, Dougie’s small scales were broken down this way, his decaying flesh submerged in a solution of around 200 degrees Fahrenheit until all that was left were the memories of his companionship, the bones that decorate Czerwinski’s office, and a non-toxic brown liquid that smells vaguely like an unkempt pet store. If Dougie had been a human, a metal hip or breast implant may have been left behind for the machine operator to remove after his liquified body had been drained from the chamber.

To Czerwinski, alkaline hydrolysis was the clear choice for her 10-year-old lizard companion. Right around the time Dougie was born, Czerwinski’s dad, Joe Wilson, had an idea that would revolutionize the death industry: creating an American market for body-liquifying machines.

Body liquification takes off

Bio-Response officially got started on November 26, 2009, as the brainchild of Joe Wilson, who had previously worked in waste management for STERIS, a medical equipment company that focuses on infection prevention. For most, going to a medical waste conference sounds mundane, but on a crisp November day when Wilson attended one in Baltimore, he was blown away.

In the early ‘90s, the late professor Gordon Kaye of Albany Medical College faced a problem: He needed to dispose of research animals that contained radioisotopes in a safe and economically feasible way. A colleague, Peter Weber had an idea. He took a sample rat, liquified it, through alkaline hydrolysis, and returned the resulting bone powder to Kaye. It was a breakthrough, particularly for the disposal of corpses used in research contexts.

Seven years later, Wilson took his seat at a conference presentation led by Kaye. “I learned that not only did alkaline hydrolysis dissolve tissue, but it destroyed cancer drugs, embalming agents, formaldehyde, other complex chemical toxins, and was sterile,” Wilson says. “The whole idea just caught me off guard.” It was a way to sanctify the dead without burning them.

Wilson wanted to make the method useful to more professions and industries. First, he built a towable alkaline hydrolysis unit that could be transported to farms for diseased livestock disposal. This was a success, but Wilson had more ambitions: He wanted to build something that could liquefy individual people. At the time, another manufacturer was making a human-sized alkaline hydrolysis machine in Scotland, though it was expensive. This is what Wilson challenged. One night in 2010, Wilson woke up at 3 a.m. with an idea and scribbled it down. “Other people had a Rolls Royce,” he says. “I wanted to build a Chevrolet for the industry.”

What he jotted down that night became the backbone of Bio-Response today. The company, founded by Wilson four years earlier, had been selling machines for pets, appropriately called PET machines, but this changed everything. “It was a real home run,” Wilson says.

Human meets machine

Today, Bio-Response offers two options for human corpses with differing temperatures, although they custom-make machines for almost any-sized organism imaginable. “One machine went all the way up to the ceiling,” says Rob Graham, sales manager at Bio-Response.

The machines themselves are surprisingly quiet—and given the nature of the work, the mood in Bio-Response’s warehouse is surprisingly relaxed, too.. The team of builders and programmers, which Graham describes as a family, listens to music and rides around on scooters as they construct metal chambers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s like a tech startup, except instead of creating the latest AI craze, they build equipment to liquify dead people and animals. Soon, these machines will be installed in funeral homes to liquefy humans. But today, the shining silver cylinders are emitting steam as employees checked them for quality control before shipment to Las Vegas

Alkaline hydrolysis machine for humans tilted up
After almost a full day in the hot solution, the human body turns to bone and effluent.

Each machine fits one human at a time and, after being filled up with the alkaline solution, is tilted at an angle. This allows less water to be used as the body inside naturally falls into a crouching position when tilted. The machine hums for 16 to 18 hours before being drained, and the remaining bones are removed, dried, and ground into a fine dust that loved ones can take home.

But then there’s the remaining effluent, which is a fancy way to say the brown, musty liquid made of the natural byproducts of decomposition, including amino acids, salt, and sugar. To say the liquid doesn’t smell would be a lie, but it’s nothing compared to the stench of a rotting body. Aquamation practitioners then drain this effluent into the wastewater system, the same place where all of the water from sinks, toilets, showers, and washing machines go. “People are concerned that what we’re doing is drinking dead bodies,” says Philip Olson, a death studies professor at Virginia Tech who is not affiliated with Bio-Response. “There are lots of things in our wastewater system; this might be one of the least to worry about.”

Still, it does worry people, even when more traditional funerary methods process waste similarly. “During embalming, where a body is drained of blood, it is sent into the wastewater system,” Olson says. “It’s untreated.” In alkaline hydrolysis, while the waste ends up in the same place, it is treated. “It’s been sterilized by the nature of heat, which will kill anything that was living essentially,” Graham explains. There are also religious and cultural barriers to consider with aquamation as well. In the Catholic faith, alkaline hydrolysis is not an acceptable form of body disposal. This follows a history of opposition to cremation, which wasn’t allowed until the 1960s, despite the modern cremation movement beginning nearly 100 years earlier. But Wilson says strict Catholic approval isn’t stopping people. “Half the people that go through our machines are Catholics,” he estimates.

Bio-Response Solutions staff member opening the door of an alkaline hydrolysis for human bodies
While the tech behind alkaline hydrolysis precedes Bio-Response, the company has built a system that can be used in crematoriums across the world.

Still, perception is changing. When anti-apartheid activist and Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu died in 2021, most of the world had no idea what alkaline hydrolysis was. But Tutu did, and he had chosen to go through the process upon his death. Although Tutu was not Catholic, Graham says his death changed minds. “That knocked down on the barrier tremendously given he was known right underneath the Pope,” Graham says. To date, Bio-Response has sold more than 400 machines in North America alone.

The ultimate decision

But with the many options people have for their final rites, why choose this one? Olson says there are two main reasons. The first is that customers perceive the process as gentle, which is preferable to many over sending their loved ones to be burned by flame. “I’m not exactly sure what’s gentle about caustic alkali, but that’s how people perceive it—like a warm water bath,” Olson adds.

The second lies in its environmental benefits. Cremation uses about 30 gallons of fuel from propane or natural gas for one body, releases carcinogenic matter into the atmosphere, and returns a smaller percentage of ashes than hydrolysis. Traditional burial, too, has its downsides. In the embalming process, corpses are injected with two to three gallons of a cocktail of chemicals, including formaldehyde, mercury, and methanol. When a body is buried and decomposes, these chemicals can leak into our groundwater. “If you test the soil in a cemetery, most of that is toxic,” says Craig Klugman, a professor of death studies at DePaul University.

Then there’s the matter of space. Cemeteries around the world are filling up, leading more people to opt for methods that reduce their bodies to dust. Alkaline hydrolysis, its proponents argue, offers an alternative to land use, while cutting carbon emissions by 75 percent compared to cremation. Still, Olson warns that the process of producing alkaline substances for these machines can be energy intensive, even if direct emissions from running the machines are much lower than alternatives.

Of course, other eco-friendly options like human composting have been in the news for similar reasons. For now, this process is only legal in six states, but supporters hope it adds another option for environmentally friendly decomposition to the mix.

Wilson doesn’t oppose other methods of decomposition. In fact, he says he doesn’t worry about planning out how his own body is disposed of. “I don’t care what they do with it—I’ll be dead,” he says. Still, he prefers alkaline hydrolysis for its sterility. “There are certain microbes or diseases that will not be destroyed in composting like they will in alkaline hydrolysis,” he notes. Those residuals could end up in groundwater depending on how the remains are disposed of or repurposed, though as Wilson points out, they should not pose a real health threat to the living.

Although more than half of US states have legalized alkaline hydrolysis for humans in non-research settings, Indiana, where Bio-Response is based, isn’t one of them. “I mean, we just approved alcohol sales on Sunday five years ago,” says Graham. “Plus, Indiana is home to the largest casket manufacturer in the world.”

A welder at the Bio-Response Solutions warehouse
Bio-Response’s machines cost between $175,000 and $260,000.

In Wilson’s view, the Hoosier State will probably be the last to legalize this practice. And while the timing is uncertain, Bio-Response is thriving. They’ve quadrupled their output since 2017 and now send around 100 machines annually around the globe. “If all 50 states came on at once, we might lack quality trying to outpace ourselves,” Graham says.

When he dies, if it’s in a state where alkaline hydrolysis is legal, Graham says he absolutely would choose it. “I hope I’ve made a friend that will let me ride through there,” he says. If that happens, Graham will be one in a growing group of Americans who end up churning in the warm waters of an aquamation machine until all that remains is a fine powder, a musty liquid, and memories.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Water Cremation

— What It Is and How It Could Reduce the Environmental Impact of Funerals

Water cremation may offer a more sustainable approach for the funeral sector

By Valentina Morando

As society becomes more environmentally conscious, the funeral sector is under increasing pressure to adopt sustainable practices.

On July 3, Co-op Funeralcare, a leading funeral service provider in the UK, announced that it will be the first company in the country to offer Resomation, also known as water cremation.

This innovative approach could be a more sustainable alternative to burial or gas cremation, which currently account for 20% and 80% of funerals in the UK, respectively, according to Co-op.

“With much of the research having been undertaken overseas to date, there is a strong evidence base to suggest that Resomation may be a more sustainable option than Gas Cremation,” Co-op writes in their press release announcing the new offer. “This is something which the Co-op and providers of Resomation will be working in conjunction with sustainability experts and academia to further validate and understand through an initial pilot.”

Water cremation would also be the first alternative to burial or cremation in the UK since 1902.

“For decades there have been just two main choices when it comes to their end-of-life arrangements: burial and cremation. By starting to make Resomation available in the UK, Co-op will be providing people with another option for how they leave this world because this natural process uses water, not fire, making it gentler on the body and kinder on the environment,” Resomation service Kindly Earth Director Julian Atkinson said.

According to a YouGov poll conducted on behalf of Co-op, 89% of adults in the UK adults had not heard of Resomation. However, once it was explained to them, 29% said they would choose Resomation for their funeral. Meanwhile, 17% of adult respondents who had organized a funeral in the last five years said they would have considered Resomation if it had been an option.

Do you know what Resomation is?
29% of UK adults said they would choose Resomation for their own funeral if it was available ⬇
Find out more here: https://t.co/uwcKWtxsfQ https://t.co/rvGdGXCvrr
— Co-op Funeralcare (@CoopFuneralcare) July 3, 2023

How it works

Water cremation, scientifically known as alkaline hydrolysis or resomation, is a process that dissolves the human body through the use of water, heat, and alkaline chemicals.

As the Co-op press release specifies, “each cycle takes approximately four hours. At the end of the cycle, the soft bones which are left are dried, then reduced to a white powder, similar to ash.” The ash is then “returned to relatives in a sustainable urn.”

Water vs traditional cremation

One of the key advantages of water cremation, according to Resomation, the pioneering company for water cremation in the UK, is its significantly reduced carbon footprint compared to traditional cremation.

As the organization writes, water cremation “has been independently shown to have the lowest and indeed little environmental impact at all compared to burial and flame cremation.”

This reduction is achieved through the decrease in fuel consumption associated with the combustion process, making water cremation a more sustainable choice.

Moreover, water cremation also addresses concerns related to mercury emissions, which have been associated with traditional cremation methods.

Dental amalgams (a dental filling material), which contain mercury, are often present in human remains, and during the incineration process these mercury emissions can contribute to air pollution. With water cremation, the mercury can be captured and safely recycled, further reducing the environmental impact of cremation.

Not entirely new

While Co-op Funeralcare will be the first funeral service provider in the UK to offer water cremation, the practice is not entirely new. It has been gaining traction in other countries, such as Canada, many American states, and South Africa, where it is already legal and widely used.

Water-based disposal has garnered significant attention worldwide, and one prominent advocate of this approach was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the late anti-apartheid campaigner.

His adoption of water-based disposal has brought increased visibility to the practice.

“We have seen interest in water-based disposal build in many countries, with Archbishop Desmond Tutu being the most high-profile person to recently use this method,” said Professor Douglas Davies from Durham University. “The reduced carbon footprint that may come with Resomation compared with other forms of body disposal, means it will no doubt be of interest to many people as the practice is increasingly made available in the UK.”

As water cremation gains momentum and acceptance worldwide, it holds the potential to become a more environmentally conscious alternative to gas cremation or, as Co-op put it, “to revolutionize the way we say goodbye to loved ones.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Meet the startup “growing” mushroom caskets and urns to “enrich life after death”

— When it comes to matters of life and death, there may be a missing key ingredient of conversation: mushrooms.

Director Lonneke Westhoff, right, and founder Bob Hendrikx, left, of Dutch startup Loop Biotech display one of the cocoon-like coffins, grown from local mushrooms and up-cycled hemp fibres, designed to dissolve into the environment amid growing demand for more sustainable burial practices, in Delft, Netherlands, Monday, May 22, 2023.

By Li Cohen

A new startup has found that fungi can go beyond filling people’s plates while they are alive. They can also be used to take care of their bodies once they’re dead. The company, Loop Biotech, is “growing” coffins and urns by combining mycelium – the root structure of mushrooms – with hemp fiber.

The founders of the company say they want to “collaborate with nature to give humanity a positive footprint,” a goal that is difficult to achieve with today’s common burial practices.

A study published last year in Chemosphere, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, found that cemeteries can be potential sources of soil and water contamination, with people in urban areas that live close to packed cemeteries are most at-risk of those effects. Heavy metals are among the pollutants that can leach into the soil and water, the study found.

And even if people opt for cremation, that process emits “several pollutants,” including carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, the authors of the study said.

Shawn Harris, a U.S. investor in Loop Biotech, told the Associated Press that the startup is a way to change that situation.&

“We all have different cultures and different ways of wanting to be buried in the world. But I do think there’s a lot of us, a huge percentage of us, that would like it differently,” he said. “And it’s been very old school the same way for 50 or 100 years.”

Loop Biotech offers three options, all of which they say are “100% nature” – a “Living Cocoon” that looks like a stone casket, a “ForestBed,” which they say is the “world’s first living funeral carrier” that looks like a thin open-top casket covered with moss in its bed, and an urn for those who prefer to be cremated that comes with a plant of choice to sprout up from the ashes.

All of these items, the Dutch company says, are “grown in just 7 days” and biodegrade in only 45 days once they are buried.

“Instead of: ‘we die, we end up in the soil and that’s it,’ now there is a new story: We can enrich life after death and you can continue to thrive as a new plant or tree,” the startup’s 29-year-old founder Bob Hendrikx told the Associated Press. “It brings a new narrative in which we can be part of something bigger than ourselves.”

Along with being more environmentally friendly than traditional burials, the products are also cheaper, ranging from about $200 to just over $1,000. A metal burial casket costs, on average, $2,500, according to the National Funeral Directors Association’s 2021 report, and a cremation casket and urn combined cost an average of about $1,600. Wood burial caskets cost even more, about $3,000.

For now, Loop Biotech is making about 500 coffins or urns a month, and ships them only across Europe, the AP reported.

“It’s the Northern European countries where there is more consciousness about the environment and also where there’s autumn,” Hendrikx said. “So they know and understand the mushroom, how it works, how it’s part of the ecosystem.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Washing and dressing our dead

— The movement challenging how we grieve

Shelley Anson took part in a washing and dressing ritual when her mother Lorraine died. Here, she holds a frame photo of her parents.

Advocates say that modern practices have robbed us of centuries-old rituals and interrupt a profound and pivotal point in the grieving process.

By Sophie Aubrey

Four days after her mother died, Shelley Anson walked into a candlelit room at a funeral home. There, her mother Lorraine lay on a bed, tucked in as though she were just asleep. A cooling mat to slow decomposition was humming away beneath her body.

“She looked so beautiful. She had colour in her face, even her lips. I asked if it was make-up, but it was from massage. I was in absolute disbelief and awe, I cried and cried,” Anson says.

“I was kissing her and she was cold to the touch, but that was OK. I was telling her how much I loved her, how grateful for her I was and how happy that she was reunited with my dad.”

For the next three hours, Anson cuddled her mother, brushed her hair and washed her face, arms, torso and legs with warm water and myrrh oil. Finally, she dressed her in her favourite sequined maroon dress for the funeral.

The experience, in December, was transformative for Anson’s grief.

“It was perfect in every way. It brought me absolute, great peace,” she says. “I could have stayed longer, but I felt like I’d finally done enough and that it was OK to go home.”

In contemporary Australia, much as in the rest of the Western world, our eyes are closed to the realities of death. The dead are often hurried away from a hospital room by an appointed funeral director and not seen again, unless a family chooses to farewell them with an open casket.

But there is a growing push towards keeping vigil with a loved one after their death and taking on the care of their body, either at a private house or a funeral home.

Advocates of what’s been termed the “death-positive movement” say our modern, sanitised practice interrupts our grieving process, creates a fear of death and has contributed to the loss of centuries-old rituals of caring for our loved ones.

A bereavement casting made by Pia Interlandi of Shelley Anson’s hand clasping her mother’s.
A bereavement casting made by Pia Interlandi of Shelley Anson’s hand clasping her mother’s.

Libby Moloney is the founder of Natural Grace, a Victorian holistic funeral company that has been at the forefront of shifting the narrative around after-death care.

“In the 1900s we surrendered the care of our dead to well-meaning strangers in what we now know as the funeral industry. In a way death was sterilised and outsourced. It’s a model that’s very much about easing your burden, taking away the stress,” she says.

But Moloney says this robs families of a pivotal point in the mourning process that comes from the act of being with the body of their loved one, of feeling the stillness of their hand.

“It happens to everybody, and it’s deeply sacred,” Moloney says. “It takes the human mind and body about three days, where there’s a visceral, profound knowing that ‘I’m ready’ – ready to separate from the body of my person and I can now go on to the next steps. It’s unbelievably empowering.”

She says at least 80 per cent of her clients have an element of death care, with roughly half choosing to do this at home, the other half at her Woodend or Fairfield sanctuaries. These rituals usually take place over a three-day period before a funeral ceremony and burial or cremation.

Tasmania-based Bec Lyons spent six years in the mainstream funeral industry before becoming a death doula and independent funeral practitioner. Today, she leads both the Australian Home Funeral Alliance and Natural Death Advocacy Network, which aim to raise awareness of family-led funerals, death care and natural burials.

Death care is not for everybody, but Lyons’ goal is to teach people that there isn’t just one way to grieve. Most Australians don’t know that they don’t have to appoint a funeral director, and that it’s perfectly legal and safe to care for the body of their loved one. In NSW, the deceased can stay at home for up to five days; in Victoria, there is no prescribed limit. The key requirements are to register the death and arrange a burial or cremation.

Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows there were more than 171,000 registered deaths in 2021, up from almost 147,000 10 years earlier. It’s estimated that by 2066, the number of annual deaths will be over 430,000.

“There’s a pertinent conversation around what are we going to do with all those bodies? Death needs to move back into the home,” Lyons says.

With 70 per cent of Australians wanting to die at home, Lyons believes that the older generation, having watched their parents die in nursing homes, want to do things differently.

She says the number of home funerals she’s facilitated has doubled in the last 12 months, which she puts down to increased understanding of death, as well as financial considerations: they can be half the cost of a typical funeral.

Lyons says more people began to explore the idea of after-death care and home funerals (meaning a dead person is kept at home until they are put to rest) during COVID-19, when restrictions stripped away usual mourning practices. Holding vigil at home was still possible.

“In conventional Western society, the only vehicle we have to mourn is the funeral ceremony. For people who want that, that’s fantastic. But when COVID-19 hit, you ended up with grief that had no outlet,” she says. “Grief is an emotion that needs something to do.”

Anson’s mother died at age 79, 2½ years after a brain cancer diagnosis. Anson, an end-of-life doula and nurse, cared for her at home for the first seven months until, emotionally, she couldn’t do it any longer. But putting her mother in a nursing home weighed heavily.

It’s why after-death care and being with her mother’s body was extraordinarily healing: “That was my way of giving that last bit of love that I felt I hadn’t been able to give.”

Melbourne Chevra Kadisha CEO Simon Weinstein with volunteer Yaelle Schachna.
Melbourne Chevra Kadisha CEO Simon Weinstein with volunteer Yaelle Schachna.

Several religions and cultures have preserved ancient death care rituals. In Islam, it’s customary for same-sex relatives to wash the bodies of their dead, usually three times, then wrap them in sheets. Hindu families traditionally wash a body with holy ingredients such as milk, honey and ghee before dressing them.

Simon Weinstein is chief executive of the Melbourne Chevra Kadisha, a funeral home that serves much of the city’s Jewish community and delivers funerals according to Orthodox laws and traditions.

In Judaism, a burial should happen as quickly as possible, preferably within a day, and until that happens, a body is guarded – an act called “shemirah” – by family sitting close by to protect and comfort the soul.

The body is also washed in a ritual of purification and immersed in a holy bath. Weinstein says this process, tahara, is done by trained, same-sex volunteers as children and grandchildren of the dead cannot be involved to preserve modesty – but the community is tight-knit, and there is often a connection with at least one volunteer. “It’s an act of ultimate kindness and respect,” he says.

The cotton shrouds for the ritual of tahara are ironed at Melbourne Chevra Kadisha.
The cotton shrouds for the ritual of tahara are ironed at Melbourne Chevra Kadisha.

The dead person is then dressed in white cotton shrouds, and it’s at the end of this process that close relatives sometimes enter the room to place a cap on the head or tie a final bow.

“A common theme that comes out is how angelic they look. It’s very comforting for families,” Weinstein says.

Yaelle Schachna was praying in a room next door when her late grandmother was undergoing tahara. She joined for the final stage. “I gave my grandmother a kiss and it was very peaceful for me to see her. I could say goodbye.”

Last year, Schachna became a Chevra Kadisha volunteer. She this week helped send off her great aunt in a purifying ritual.

“For the first time, I stood there and was teary the whole time,” she says. “It was a beautiful send-off. I think you can hear in my tone the holiness I feel.”

There are two methods of looking after a dead body. One is through cleaning and cooling, which slows rather than stalls decomposition. The other is with embalming, which involves injecting chemicals such as formaldehyde and methanol to prevent the corpse from degrading.

Death positive advocate Dr Pia Interlandi, here pictured in 2014, runs Garments for the Grave.
Death positive advocate Dr Pia Interlandi, here pictured in 2014, runs Garments for the Grave.

RMIT senior lecturer Dr Pia Interlandi has been involved with the death-positive movement for a decade, creating bereavement casts – one of which she made for Anson of her and her mother’s clasped hands – and running Garments for the Grave.

Interlandi believes the movement goes together with attitudes on living sustainably. “If you love composting and the environment, it doesn’t make sense to be embalmed with chemicals and put in a box lined with plastic,” she says.

“Embalming is sold as a perceived psychological protection to seeing the dead body of a person you love. The natural death movement is about saying ‘you can cope with this’.”

Interlandi says that it might feel “strange” to see a dead body at first, but the slowness of death care allows you to move through the shock. “Dressing my nonno [grandfather] was the most transformative moment of my life,” she says.

Moloney explains that dead bodies become cold and pale, while limbs stiffen and get heavy, but these changes act as signals that the person is ready to be returned to nature. “It’s incredibly powerful and healthy to see those gentle changes; they inform our subconscious that we need to prepare to separate from their body.”

Ana and Thea Lamaro pictured together before Ana’s death in 2016.
Ana and Thea Lamaro pictured together before Ana’s death in 2016.

Thea Lamaro’s mother, Ana, began to prepare for her death two years before she died of breast cancer in 2016. She decided she wanted her body to be taken home to her apartment after her death, and not be left alone for three days.

Ana’s body was washed and dressed in a shroud by family and friends and Thea spent time talking to and holding her mother.

“I felt so comforted by having her body in the house. When I woke up throughout the night I could go to her,” Thea says.

Samantha Selinger-Morris with her mother, Sylvia Morris.

“[It] helped me so much to integrate the fact she had finally died. It was a very gentle way of saying goodbye.”

Thea, who is developing a podcast series called Approaching The End speaking to people preparing to die, says she appreciated being able to decide the moment her mum’s body left the house: “I was letting her go rather than having her taken from me.”

Interlandi hopes that our conversations on death evolve past the question “do you want to be buried or cremated?” and towards: What type of funeral do you want? Who do you want to be cared for by? How do you want to be dispersed?

“People think it’s hippie woo-woo, and it’s not. There is a spiritual component, of course, because this is ritual – but it’s about choice and how you identify yourself in life goes into how you identify yourself in death.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Leaving the earth a better place

By Kathleen McQuillan

Three young men work in silence excavating the place where their grandmother’s body will be buried — free of harsh embalming chemicals or the effects of a fiery furnace. No concrete vault or steel casket. Her remains are “dressed” in her favorite pajamas and wrapped in a simple white cotton shroud, ready to be placed in a designated plot of ground at what is called a “conservation burial site”. A hand-made wicker basket housed her body for the length of time it took to decompose. The lid was covered with dried ferns, rose petals, and her favorite wildflowers. Although the men have agreed to silence, nothing stops a steady flow of memories, some of which will be shared for the lowering of her body into this hallowed ground. With explicit details on how to prepare the site, they are fulfilling their role in what will be remembered as their family’s ritual of final good-byes.

As I read this story, I recalled the burial rite for my mother who died five years ago. My brothers and I agreed to dispense of a formal funeral because most of our extended family were scattered across the country and all of my mother’s closest friends had predeceased her. Not aware of alternatives, we decided on a simple cremation and planned to disperse Mom’s ashes at a place we’d named “Karen’s Rock”.

Located up a hill and across an abandoned pasture left fallow for at least thirty years, a massive granite boulder rises out of the willow brush and wild plum. My guess is that it was deposited there by an advancing glacier scraping its way across the landscape some ten thousand years ago. When my sister died in 1997, this was where I sprinkled her ashes with my family in full agreement that this unique rock monument would act as a suitable headstone. On the day we sprinkled our mother’s ashes, I and my siblings shared a warm and comforting thought. Our mother was finally reunited with her daughter.

The opening to this story was inspired by an article entitled “Down to Earth” by Kathy Jesse that appears in the Spring issue of the National Wildlife Federation magazine. It examines “eco-friendly alternatives” to the conventional funeral practices of embalming and cremation. I’d heard of “green burials” but never “natural organic reduction” or NOR, a process that places human remains in a specialized vessel with a mixture of organic materials that hasten decomposition. After six weeks, the body is fully transformed into compostable soil that is, in most cases, returned to the family for final disposition. There are twenty NOR facilities in seven states with accompanying tracts of land called “conservation burial sites” where composted remains can be buried and the land eventually available for reclamation and reforestation. Minnesota is not among them.

Interest in alternative burial practices is increasing, partly because of growing environmental concerns with embalming and cremation, and also due to increased use of services provided by hospice professionals and death doulas dedicated to educating and supporting families’ direct involvement in end-of-life decision-making and caregiving. Americans, as a whole, are becoming more at ease with issues surrounding the final stages of life. More of us are completing Advanced Directives that clarify our preferences regarding medical interventions as death draws near. Books and podcasts abound that focus on death as an inevitable and natural part of life to be discussed openly rather than denied, avoided and feared.

Since the mid-1800s, Americans have adopted embalming, burials in vaults and caskets, and more recently, cremation as our conventional methods for disposing of our bodies after death. These practices have become increasingly expensive, creating enormous financial burdens on grieving families. According to Jesse’s article, a study conducted by the National Funeral Directors Association in 2021 states “the average cost of a casket burial in the United States is $7,848, with cremation averaging $6,970.” And these figures don’t include the cost of a burial plot.

Green burials and NOR are significantly less expensive. They also inflict far less harm on the environment. As earth’s human population approaches 8 billion, how we handle our physical remains becomes an ever-increasing concern. Most of us are clustered in urban areas. The land available for burials is rapidly declining. When we take a look at the volume of natural resources consumed each year for burials — an estimated 20 million board feet of hardwoods and 64,500 tons of steel used for caskets, and 1.6 million tons of concrete for burial vaults; the toxins that leak into the soil from an estimated 4.3 million gallons of embalming fluid made of formaldehyde and other carcinogens; and atmospheric pollution from crematorium emissions estimated conservatively at 140 to 250 pounds of carbon dioxide per person — the need for less polluting alternatives becomes ever clearer!

Dr. Sara Kerr PhD., a Canadian educator, certified death doula, and founder of The Centre for Sacred DeathCare in Calgary, Alberta states on her website that NOR uses 1/8th the energy of cremation (furnaces must reach 1900 degrees F. and maintain that temperature for two hours), and NOR sequesters its carbon (about one pound per person) back into the soil. She describes human composting as “a collaborative vision in service to ecological restoration, regenerative agriculture, grief-tending, and land-based healing.”

Just imagine… our bodies giving back to Nature … a final gesture of good will in return for the life it gave us. As this method gains greater acceptance, our death rituals will evolve, bringing us together to mourn and celebrate the lives of our deceased and with a deeper understanding that death is less an “ending” and more a “returning”. For those of us standing by, we can be comforted knowing that this final act did not degrade the earthly home left behind, but instead helped to restore it.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Returning to Our Roots

— The Rise in Human Composting

More Americans are turning to human composting—now legal in six states—to avoid the environmental pitfalls of mainstream deathcare.

by Britany Robinson

Frederick “Fritz” Weresch planned on becoming a math teacher or a famous actor. He was empathetic and diplomatic, known to gently encourage the shy students to speak up in class. The high school senior loved music, learned the piano as a child, and had recently taught himself to play guitar.

He also, according to his friends, had talked about wanting to be composted after he died. His parents, Eileen and Wes Weresch, wanted this for themselves, too. They just never imagined they’d be carrying out Fritz’s wishes before their own.

Fritz, 18, was found unconscious on November 30, 2022. He died six days later from unknown but natural causes, according to his family,

His parents are still wading through the thick of mourning. “Grief brain” is making it hard to remember certain details about the months since Fritz’s death, Eileen said. But one thing she and her husband feel good and confident about was their decision to have Fritz’s body undergo human composting, also known as natural organic reduction or “terramation.”

Human composting is the process of turning human remains into nutrient-rich soil. It’s an option that avoids the environmental pitfalls of more mainstream practices: cremation releases carbon dioxide and air pollutants, and casket burial typically involves hazardous embalming chemicals and nonbiodegradable materials.

It’s a practice that some say could shift the United States’ $20 billion deathcare industry. More than 52% of Americans are interested in “green burial,” according to a 2019 survey from the National Funeral Directors’ Association (NFDA).

Six states have legalized human composting in the last four years. Washington state, where the Wereschs live, was the first, legalizing the process in 2019.

“There’s this romanticism to it,” said Haley Morris, a spokesperson with Earth Funeral, a human composting facility in Auburn, Washington. “So many people want to turn into a tree.” But at the root of this romantic idea is something that’s increasingly possible, Morris explains: “For your final act to do good for the Earth.”

When Fritz died, Eileen and Wes approached Return Home, a Seattle-based company, to care for his remains and host a laying-in ceremony. His body was placed in a large, white, reusable vessel on a bed of organic materials—straw, alfalfa, and wood chips. Loved ones added flowers and notes to the mix. Fritz’s best friend cut off his long, curly black hair to lay with Fritz, prompting other attendees to leave locks of their hair as well.

“We got to be there and be part of the process,” Eileen said. “Our culture has made dead bodies icky or scary and that’s not the case.” She said something doesn’t feel right about seeing an embalmed body. “But [Fritz’s] body felt so right. You could hold his hand, and it felt like holding his hand.”

With Eileen’s permission, Return Home captured and shared a video of the ceremony to Tik Tok, where it has more than 600,000 followers.

“The first and most important thing we need to do is win over hearts and minds,” said Micah Truman, the founder of Return Home. He said one way to do that has been to normalize and provide explanations on human composting via social media.

“There’s this romanticism to it…for your final act to do good for the Earth.” — Haley Morris, spokesperson, Earth Funeral

Human composting, or as Return Home calls it “terramation,” is typically an eight to 12-week process, depending on the provider. Once a body has arrived at a human composting facility, they’re placed in a reusable vessel. Some providers, like Return Home, offer funeral services or a “laying-in” ceremony, after which the vessel is sealed and naturally occurring microbes begin to decompose the body. Rotating the vessel along with careful control of temperature and moisture levels also help the process along. Details vary across providers, including how bones are dealt with. At Return Home, they’re removed after one month, reduced to tiny shards, and returned to the vessel to continue decomposing.

The resulting soil, about one cubic yard, can be used to plant trees, spread in gardens, or saved however the family sees fit. Some families opt to donate soil to a nature preserve or land restoration project, Morris said, adding that Earth Funeral owns five acres on the Olympic Peninsula where they send donated soil.

Until recently, most Americans were buried in caskets. Casket burial typically involves embalming the body with chemicals, including formaldehyde, menthol, phenol, and glycerin. Every year in the U.S. 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde go into the ground with embalmed bodies, according to the Green Burial Project. Formaldehyde is listed as a probable human carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency, and according to a study by the National Cancer Institute, morticians have a significantly higher rate of myeloid leukemia.

In addition to toxic chemicals, casket burial uses an abundance of materials—concrete, wood, steel—for a single purpose, which are then left in the ground. Land usage is another concern. Cemeteries use up land that might otherwise offer natural habitat to wild animals or housing for humans, covering those acres with monoculture lawns treated with petrochemicals. The space to do this, especially near population-dense cities, is becoming scarce. A traditional funeral with a casket burial is also expensive. The median cost in 2021 was $7,848, according to NFDA.

Today, slightly more Americans opt for cremation, a cheaper and less land-intensive option than burial, but one with its own problems. The impact of burning corpses on air quality made headlines in 2020 when Los Angeles county was forced to suspend limits on the number of cremations due to a backlog of bodies from the coronavirus pandemic. Those limits exist because cremation releases air pollutants, including particulate matter. Most of these are filtered out by post-treatment systems, but cremation still emits about 573 pounds of carbon dioxide—the equivalent of a 500-mile car journey—per corpse.

From a financial perspective, human composting typically costs less than casket burial and more than cremation. Return Home’s standard pricing is $4,950.

Eileen Weresch first heard about human composting on an NPR segment back in 2019. She researched the process and, that night, brought it up over chicken fajitas with her family.

“I was fascinated,” said Eileen. “We talked about how it’s carbon capturing instead of carbon emitting; how it’s going back to our roots.” And so it was decided: Eileen and Wes wished to undergo human composting when they died. Eileen recalled that Fritz, “was super into it, too.”

Fritz was an organ donor. While Wes and Eileen held vigil during their son’s final days on life support, they heard from several of Fritz’s friends. They wanted Fritz’s parents to know he had told them he wanted his body to be composted when he died. Those friends, along with hundreds of classmates and loved ones, lined the halls of the hospital for Fritz’s “honor walk,” when Fritz was wheeled to the operating room where his organs were prepared for donation.

“I believe that in the future, medical science will prove that at least one aspect of what we call ‘love’ resides in our physical bodies and ourselves,” Eileen told those who had gathered to say goodbye. After Fritz died, his body was transported to Return Home.

“I believe that in the future, medical science will prove that at least one aspect of what we call ‘love’ resides in our physical bodies and ourselves.” — Eileen Weresch, Mother to a terramated young person

Truman, the founder of Return Home, was an investor when he first heard about human composting. He’d been looking for a new focus in life. “I’d come to the conclusion that infinite growth in a finite world is madness,” he says. He wanted to build a company where “the bigger it gets, the better the world gets.”

After first hearing about human composting, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. At first, it struck him as odd. But the more he talked to people who loved the idea of becoming soil after death, the better he understood the appeal. “Love it or hate it,” he says, “this idea will live in your head rent-free. I just had to do it.” He opened Return Home in June of 2021.

Rob Goff, executive director of the Washington State Funeral Directors Association, says they receive calls from all over the world, from people who want to know more about human composting, which is estimated to become a $1 billion industry. Traditional funeral homes in Washington are responding to this demand, many of which have added human composting as a line item, working with providers to transport bodies to their facilities.

Human composting as practiced by startups like Return Home isn’t the only way to lessen the environmental burden of deathcare, said Carlton Basmajian, urban planner and author of Planning for the Deceased. The terramation process is best understood as an alternative to cremation because the body is broken down in a facility and the family is given the remains at the end of the process. He said he sees more promise in so-called “natural” or “green” burials, which entails designating land for the burial of bodies without chemicals or coffins. (Many of these sites, including one that Eileen approached, only allow for burials during warmer months when the soil is soft.)

“[Natural burial] has the potential to allow us to preserve and rehabilitate larger areas of land,” said Basmajian.

Truman said he believes the process at Return Home gives families more time to grieve, compared to the long-standing traditions of the funeral industry. With human composting, families can visit their loved one’s vessel throughout decomposition. They can call and check in on how the process is going. The traditional funeral industry, Truman says, has turned grieving into a 48-hour process, but many find that insufficient. “We hurt, and we do it for a long time.”

In February, more than two months after Fritz died, Eileen received a call notifying her that Fritz’s body had completed its transformation into soil. She and her husband are now making plans to distribute his remains to loved ones and build a memorial garden in his honor.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Rest in … compost?

— These ‘green funerals’ offer an eco-friendly afterlife.

A shrouded mannequin demonstrates the “laying in” ceremony at Recompose, a human composting facility in Seattle. Human composting, water cremation, and green burials are gaining traction as people seek to minimize their environmental impact in death.

Traditional burial and cremation pollute the ground and emit carbon dioxide. People are looking for new options.

By Allie Yang

You may have seen the headlines: Earlier this year, New York State became the sixth in the nation to legalize something called human composting. In 2022, Archbishop Desmond Tutu chose to be cremated not by flame, but by water, in a process called alkaline hydrolysis. In 2019, actor Luke Perry was buried in a “mushroom suit” made of cotton and seeded with mushroom spores. All were part of a push to make the afterlife more eco-friendly.

Death care has remained largely unchanged in the United States ever since embalming and burial became the de facto method as far back as the Civil War, says Caitlin Doughty, mortician and founder of death care advocacy nonprofit Order of the Good Death. Most people don’t even have access to other options: burials and cremation are the only methods that are legal in all 50 states. 

Traditional burial methods harm the planet in various ways. Embalming slows the decay of a person’s body so that it’s presentable at a funeral—but after burial, the chemicals used for embalming leach into the ground. Caskets require enormous amounts of wood and metal, and cemeteries often build concrete vaults in the ground to protect them. Even cremation requires a lot of fuel, and generates millions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year.

Now, however, a variety of theoretically more sustainable death care alternatives are increasingly being offered around the country. Here’s what you need to know.

Green or natural burial

Green burials have been used as long as humans have been burying bodies. Both Native American and Jewish communities traditionally use green burials. But in recent generations, they have fallen out of fashion as people opted for more elaborate burials. Green or “simple” burials became more commonly used for the poor and wards of the state.

These are generally defined as burials using materials that are both nontoxic and biodegradable. In a typical green burial, the deceased is dressed in a 100 percent cotton shroud and buried in a plain pine box.

In some cases people choose to “become” a tree in death by having a tree planted over their plot. (However, the tree burial pods that kicked off this trend—in which bodies are wrapped in an egg-shaped pod that supposedly feeds the roots of a young tree—are not available for commercial use and it’s unclear if they are even viable.)

(In these cemeteries, nature also rests in peace.)

Almost every cemetery in the U.S. has an area reserved for green, or “simple” burials, according to Ed Bixby, president of the Green Burial Council (GBC), which helps educate and certify burial grounds meeting sustainability standards. On some burial properties, plots are marked via GPS and a natural stone marker—otherwise, the area is left to grow wild, becoming less like a cemetery and more like a nature preserve full of life.

Most families who choose natural burial also forgo embalming, often seeing the process as overly invasive, when refrigeration alone adequately preserves the body. Others opt for gentler embalming fluids made without formaldehyde, which are becoming increasingly available.

But could these simple burials contribute to the spread of disease or pollution of the land? The data from existing research on traditional cemeteries “doesn’t indicate that bodies are dangerous in and of themselves,” says Lee Webster, director of New Hampshire Funeral Resources and Education and former director of GBC, adding that vaults, chemicals, and non-organic containers used in traditional burial do contribute to pollution. 

Further, the WHO has found “no evidence that corpses pose a risk of epidemic disease—most agents do not survive long in the human body after death.”

Still, it’s unclear if some of the newer variations of green burials are effective. For example, the brand responsible for Luke Perry’s mushroom suit claimed it would neutralize toxins and give nutrients back to the earth. Years earlier, however, the suit’s maker had hired mortician Melissa Unfred to study the suit—Unfred found there was no evidence the suit had any real effect.

Water cremation

One cremation creates an average of 534 pounds of carbon dioxide, one scientist told Nat Geo in 2016. Toxins from embalming fluid and nonorganic implants like pacemakers or tooth fillings also go up in smoke. Water cremation—also known as aquamation or alkaline hydrolysis—produces the same result with significantly less environmental impact and for some, a spiritual benefit.

(Greenhouse gases, explained.)

Native Hawaiians practiced a form of water cremation for thousands of years. They would use heated volcanic water to break down the bodies of their loved ones, says Dean Fisher, water cremation consultant and former director of Mayo Clinic’s donated body program. Then they would bury the remaining bones, where they believed the soul’s spiritual essence was stored.

The tradition has fallen out of practice in recent years—but in July 2022 Hawaii legalized water cremation, putting the tradition back within reach.

Water cremation machines work by pumping a heated alkaline fluid around a body for four to six hours, exponentially accelerating the natural decomposition process. Bodies can be embalmed or unembalmed and dressed in any material that is 100 percent natural. After the body breaks down, only bones and non-organic implants remain. The bones are dried, crushed, and returned to the family.

The only byproduct of water cremation is nontoxic, sterile water that can be recycled into the local water supply—270 gallons of it, or slightly less than what the average American household uses in a day. There are no emissions into the ground or air.

But water cremation does have its drawbacks. For one, traditional cremations are more readily available, faster, and usually less expensive. Water cremation also requires energy to heat the water and run the pump, although a Dutch study from 2011 showed that’s only 10 percent of the energy used in flame cremation.

Further, some critics of water cremation argue it is immoral or disrespectful to the deceased, akin to flushing your loved one down the drain. However, advocates counter that water cremation simply accelerates the natural decomposition process and is no different from the blood from routine embalming that also goes through water treatment to be neutralized.

Either way, water cremation appears to be gaining steam in the U.S. It is currently legal in 28 states—and 15 of them approved it within the last decade.

Human composting

Human composting turns bodily remains to soil through a highly controlled process—very different from food composting that can be done in your backyard. In a sealed container, a body is cocooned in a mix of natural materials like wood chips and straw. Over a month or more, the vessel heats up from active microbes that start to break the body down. Fans blow oxygen into the container, which is regularly rotated to reactivate the microbes.

(How composting works.)

After 30 to 50 days, bone and any non-organic matter are taken out. The bones are then ground down and returned to the material. It takes another few weeks to “cure,” as microbes finish their work and the soil dries out. The end result is a cubic yard of compost that families can use or donate to environmental causes.

There are environmental costs to human composting, also called natural organic reduction (NOR). Fuel is needed to transport elements like wood chips, and electricity is used to power air pumps, fans, and the vessel rotation.

“We’re just getting started as a company tightening [those elements] up,” says Katrina Spade, founder of Recompose, the first NOR facility in the country located in Seattle, Washington. Still, she says the company’s own assessment of the process showed just over a metric ton of carbon savings per person over traditional cremation or burial.

Human composting is rare. It’s only legal in six states—most recently in New York in January. But a Massachusetts lawmaker has also proposed a bill to allow human composting, and advocates like Spade believe that a number of states will legalize it in 2023.

But even if you’re not interested in an eco-friendly afterlife, advocates say that these burial alternatives come with another advantage: Families can be more involved in the death care of their loved ones, from bathing and dressing them at home to lowering their body into the grave if they choose a green burial.

“It’s not required. But it’s always encouraged to do what you can, if you wish,” Bixby says, adding that most families embrace being part of the process. “You’ll watch them go through the gamut of emotions… then when they’re done, they’ll have this genuinely serene smile on their face. They found a greater sense of acceptance of that passing through the process.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!