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
timesonline.co.uk/tutankhamun
