New body 'liquefaction' unit unveiled in Florida funeral home
 

A Glasgow-based company has installed its first commercial "alkaline hydrolysis" unit at a Florida funeral home.

The unit by Resomation Ltd is billed as a green alternative to cremation and works by dissolving the body in heated alkaline water.

The facility has been installed at the Anderson-McQueen funeral home in St Petersburg, and will be used for the first time in the coming weeks. It is hoped other units will follow in the US, Canada and Europe.

The makers claim the process produces a third less greenhouse gas than cremation, uses a seventh of the energy, and allows for the complete separation of dental amalgam for safe disposal.

Mercury from amalgam vaporised in crematoria is blamed for up to 16% of UK airborne mercury emissions, and many UK crematoria are currently fitting mercury filtration systems to meet reduced emission targets.

"Resomation was developed in response to the public's increasing environmental concerns," company founder Sandy Sullivan told BBC News. "It gives them that working third choice, which allows them to express those concerns in a very positive and I think personal way."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14114555


Note: 30 August 2011 Last updated at 10:52 GMT

Soylent green can't be too far away now.

heh, I had to laugh, my thought exactly :rotfl2:

"Is that a milkshake?"

"No, it's me mum."

To heck with cremation or liquification. Bury my intact body in a real grave with a marble headstone that has my name engraved on it.

:rotfl2:

:doh:

If when my time comes there is no free lot available in cemetery, then conduct burial at sea please. Thanks!

Used for what?

A pub

I don't know...housing, parks, a lot of other things not on my mind right now. I was only half serious, as I don't claim the right to dictate how others spend their lives, or afterlives. For myself, I consider a rotting corpse a waste of space that living people could be using.

They must have awful small pubs in Estonia that can fit in a 4x8 foot plot. :yep:

Our graveyards contain more than one plot.

Well, it will be cremation for me. We have a family tree in a forest cemetery (don't know the real English word for it. It's a forest in which the ashes of people are buried between the roots of trees in dissolving urns....so it's back to the roots for me.:D)

I know a few human-shaped animated meat sacks I would place in the same category.