It sounds like the stuff of horror movies -- placing a body in a steel tube and then covering it with a mixture of water and acid until most of the remains are liquefied. But it's actually a scientific process called alkaline hydrolysis that is on track toward becoming an alternative to cremation in California. Lawmakers are unanimously supporting a bill that would legalize the procedure with heavy oversight at mortuaries and funeral homes. Last year Florida passed a similar law, but no business has a license to perform the procedure.Of course, the "journalist" gets the chemistry wrong right from the start. For alkaline hydrolysis, you need a base, not an acid. I'll bet she never even took high school chemistry. Acids are a rotten way to dispose of bodies.
California Assemblyman Jeff Miller sponsored the bill when he learned that it was an eco-friendly alternative to cremation. "California is famous for going green, not only just as a way of life but as a way of taking care of loved ones in end of life," said Miller's legislative director, Johannes Escudero...
It doesn't sound like such a clean green process to me. Alkaline digestion will turn a body into soup all right, and convert all the fats to soaps, but it really won't get rid of the parts of the body that would contribute most to pollution, the nitrogen in the proteins. I suppose if you have good nitrogen removal on the sewage system, that's OK, but it seems unnecessarily messy. What's wrong with cremation? Just make sure it's a lean mix, and doesn't create any smoke. The carbon in the body came from plants that fixed it from CO2, so it's carbon neutral, in the long run. Heck, with luck you might even be able to extract enough energy from burning a body to feed a little power back into to grid. For some people, being good fuel might be their only contribution.
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