The Green Funeral

A few days ago I visited an area of a local cemetery which has been developed for `woodland' burials. Having read about these I wanted to see this facility for myself. The advantage of woodland burial is that, unlike the majority of traditional inhumations, no embalming fluids which can leech into the soil are used, the coffin is made of bio-degradable materials and so everything decomposes much more rapidly and cleanly. I must confess though that I was rather disappointed with what I saw. I was expecting a quiet corner of a wood, replete with wild flowers, sweet birdsong and so forth. In reality I found an exposed and rather muddy field with a handful of newly planted trees, adjacent to the main cemetery, with very little to distinguish it other than the floral tributes which had been scattered here and there by the wind. Woodland burials are a step in the right direction, I'll grant you that, but I can't really see them catching on and making that much of a difference to the ecological problems we all face. Burial has probably had its day, at least in the modern west, anyway. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the pioneering cremationists saw cremation as a much more sanitary and ecologically viable alternative to earth burial and they were right to do so. Nevertheless, the process of cremation itself involves the emission of a multitude of noxious substances into our environment. It is a little known fact, for example, that 10% of the mercury in the atmosphere can be traced to the combustion of dental fillings during the process of cremation. Since environmental concerns should be high on everyone's agenda, I think it is time to reevaluate how we dispose of the dead, just as the cremationists did over a hundred years ago. We could start by reflecting on the sentiments expressed in the Cremation Society of England's founding declaration (1874). This acknowledges that cremation was the best available solution at the time but could certainly be improved upon in the future:

"We disapprove of the present custom of burying the dead, and desire to substitute some mode which shall rapidly resolve the body into its component elements by a process which cannot offend the living, and shall render the remains absolutely innocuous. Until some better method is devised, we desire to adopt that usually known as cremation."

So, has some better method been devised? Is it now time for a widescale reassessment of how we dispose of our dead? I believe that the answer to both of these questions is a definite yes. The Swedes have developed a method which is termed `Promession' and it seems to me to offer a brilliant solution to the environmental damage inherent in present methods of disposal. Basically promession involves freezing the corpse to -18 degrees celsius and then dipping it in a tank of liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees celsius.

The corpse then becomes very brittle, so much so that that if it is vibrated it collapses into a powder. At this point, mercury and other metals are separated using an induced magnetic field and what remains is approximately 27 kilograms of powder which can be buried and will become thoroughly composted, adding nutriments to the soil, in about six months time. This is clean, eco-friendly technology which, it seems to me, we really ought to adopt and the sooner we do so the better. It would certainly be of great benefit to the environment if the funeral industry put some energy into developing this method of disposal, advocating it and making it widely available. It is my hope that the prometorium will be to the twenty first century what the crematorium was to the twentieth.

Bone Idle