They didn’t have this kind of problem in Ancient Egypt. As Britain prepares to queue to see the spectacular tomb treasures of the boy king Tutankhamun in London next week, a less heavily publicised funerary gathering will convene in less mysterious and romantic circumstances – in Gateshead.

Our burial and cremation bosses are meeting for their annual conference to discuss a delicate and increasingly urgent question: what to do with all our dead bodies.

Mummification, the arcane craft of preserving defunct Pharaohs, won’t be on the agenda. But an equally odd-sounding approach will: a way of dissolving humans that was developed for disposing of diseased cattle. Technology may take us from Cairo to cows.

We are in dire need of answers. Traditional burials are in trouble because Britain is rapidly running out of cemetery land. In Greater London, half the graveyards are full and the remaining capacity is disappearing at a rate of 10,000 new interments a year. Crematoriums, meanwhile, face mounting criticism for their high energy consumption and harmful emissions. By law they must halve the amount of mercury they funnel skywards by 2012. At the moment 16 per cent of the country’s mercury emissions come from dead people’s vaporised dentistry. Expensive “scrubbing” equipment is needed for the chimneys, but not all crematoriums can accommodate it.

The body is dissolved in an alkali solution

New technology may provide radical alternatives. The front-runner under discussion at the Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities’ (FBCA) conference is called “resomation”. In layman’s terms, it is an accelerated form of natural decomposition. The body is immersed in an alkali solution of potash lye, which is heated to about 160C in a pressurised submarine-shaped steel chamber. Two hours later, you have a watery solution that can be safely poured into the earth – and white calcium phosphate, the bone residue, that can be given to mourners like cremation ash. Dental mercury is filtered out. “Scientifically, the process involved is called alkaline hydrolysis,” explains Sandy Sullivan, an affable Scot who is pioneering the technique in Britain. “When human tissues are built, elements get bound together by the removal of water molecules. Hydrolysis puts the water back in – and unzips the tissue molecules.” Sullivan, the managing director of Resomation, the company behind the technique, is presenting his work to the conference jointly with the prestigious US Mayo Clinic, which has been using it for 18 months to deal with the remains of people who donated their bodies to medical research. “For the past decade it has been used in Florida for the batch disposal of the remains of bodies donated for research. Mayo has adopted the same process but in a more mourner-friendly manner – one body at a time, with the body entering the chamber horizontally, just like cremation,” says Sullivan.

The basic process has been used with animals since the early 1990s. Sullivan originally worked with a company that developed it for cows that had BSE or had been used for anthrax or smallpox vaccines, as it sterilises as well as decomposes. Now he says his machine is attracting interest and putative orders from America, Canada and “three or four places in Britain”.

For the ceremony, the body is placed in a reusable casket that resembles a traditional coffin. This covers an inner coffin made of silk on a metal frame. This liner is put into the chamber and the silk dissolves. “The majority of the Resomators will be installed alongside cremators as an eco-friendly alternative method,” says Sullivan.

The City of London Crematorium is interested in the technology. Dr Ian Hussain, its director, says: “I’d take one tomorrow. It seems a great invention, but first it must be approved by our board members. One snag is that the funeral directors might be unhappy about not being able to sell mourners coffins.” Duncan McCallum, the secretary of the FBCA, agrees that resomation sounds promising. “It isn’t releasing emissions into the air and it’s not doing the same damage as a burial. It seems to have a lot going for it.”

We could go back to reusing graves

Meanwhile, there are important things we could do to address the capacity problems of cemeteries and the ecological impact of crematoria, according to Tony Walter, who runs the MSc in Death and Society at the University of Bath. But they require us to become less squeamishly sentimental and much more pragmatic. First, we could reuse our graves. Until the early 19th century, burial grounds in Europe were reused indefinitely. The wooden grave markers would rot and the plots be excavated: witness the gravedigger in Hamlet, addressing a skull he has dug up. Bones would be placed in the ossuary and a new body laid in the hole. But the turnover created by Victorian Britain’s expanding population meant that diggers began excavating not only bones but flesh as well. Something had to be done. In Britain, the 1850s Burials Acts granted people graves for perpetuity.

Stop cremating people singly

The rest of Europe found a better solution: leasing graves to relatives: the shortest lease is three years in Athens. When the lease expires, relatives renew or the site is reused.

Rather than simply empty the holes, a very British compromise has been suggested by the Government. It’s called “lift and deepen” – the existing grave occupant is dug out, the grave dug down farther, the old occupant replaced and the new occupant placed on top. It’s hardly a vote winner but Walter says: “It’s been sneaked into the London Local Authorities Act, 2007, amid a load of other provisions.” Under the new Act, councils in London now have the legal right to exhume bodies that have been in the ground for at least 75 years and to practise “lift and deepen”. None of the London boroughs has yet tried to exercise these new powers, though.

Walter adds that we could also bury people less deeply. Instead of 6ft, about 3ft under would be much better as that’s where there’s oxygen and microbes to break down the flesh. “The corpse would be clean after about three years and the plots could be reused. If we used graveyards sustainably, with relatively shallow burial and reuse, the pressure on space could abate.”

We could also make crematoria much cleaner, Walter says – if we didn’t insist on the deceased being burnt individually, shortly after the curtains close.

“Environmentally we could improve crematoria by putting everyone in the furnace in one batch for, say, 48 hours a week. This would conserve masses of energy because most of the environmental cost is in heating the cremator up. I can understand, though, that people may be unhappy to know that the actual cremation does not happen on the same day as the funeral service.”

Going out with a bang

Exploding medical implants are a continual worry for crematoria staff. “Pacemakers have to be removed by a trained expert,” says Duncan McCallum, the secretary of the Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities. “Some implants, used to fix broken limbs, are very dangerous as they contain pressurised gas. In the cremator they go off with a very loud bang.”

Choose your afterlife Donate yourself

Leaving your body to medical science may not be for the squeamish, but it’s like a wholesale form of organ donation. And it gives medical students and surgeons vital practice. Since 2000, about 629 people have done it every year in England and Wales. The Human Tissue Authority says many donors are former doctors and nurses.

Be a gem

LifeGem of Illinois will extract carbon from your ashes, heat them to create graphite, then press this substance until it yields diamond crystals suitable for pendants or rings.

Freeze!

It costs between £20,000 and £120,000 to have your body cryogenically frozen in the hope that future medics can thaw you out and fix whatever killed you. Two US firms offer the service – the Cryonics Institute and Alcor – and about 161 people are now frozen, with a further 1,000 worldwide signed up, including about 100 in England.

Die for your art

Images for Eternity, another US organisation, creates pieces of art in which a person’s ashes are sprinkled on the picture and fixed there with sealant. “It’s really beautiful,” says the company. “It looks like white sand.”

Be plastic fantastic

For thousands of people, donating their bodies to Dr Gunther Von Hagens offers a form of lasting celebrity as part of his BodyWorlds show. Plastination is believed to preserve the body for anything up to 4,000 years.

Form a human pyramid

A German company, Cheops Kolumbarien, claims that the solution to lack of cemetery space is the Egyptian one: pyramids. It has built two in Germany and sold 40 per cent of space inside them. They can contain up to 11 layers and hold the ashes of more than 1,600 cremated bodies. The company says that the pyramids use only about 14 per cent of the space used by current burial methods. A burial spot costs €2,000, (1,390) plus an annual fee of €70.

FREE TUTANKHAMUN DVD

Buy The Times next Saturday to receive a free Tutankhamun DVD; and for more coverage of the Egyptian boy king go to

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