Liquify Your Dead Body – For The Earth!

While you may consider yourself a environmentalist while you are alive, have you considered being green while you are dead? People might make some great compost but one group is promoting the green way to go using a liquefying process called Resomation.

Instead of an urn or a casket, consider being buried in a bottle. In order to be properly buried, a person is generally embalmed and put in a casket. Not only does this take up wood and floor space, but embalming fluids leak back into the earth after a person has been buried, creating an environmental hazard. Cremation is just another fire putting carbon into the atmosphere (and if the person has be embalmed, it releases toxins as well). A study looking at the ecologically best way to go on to your final reward showed that resomation is the winner.

Resomation suspends the body (and sometimes the coffin) in a solution of water and alkali salts. An alkali is a basic solid known as an ‘ionic salt’. The best known one is lime, which breaks down organic solids. The process takes two to three hours. The body slowly dissolves into a powder, much the way it does during cremation. The liquid remaining is sterile, and is drained away, cleaned, and returned to the water cycle.

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