Could water cremation become the new American way to die?

At 9 p.m. on New Year's Eve, Samantha Sieber was in her pajamas watching a movie with her kids when the first call came in about Desmond Tutu. "I answered the phone, and it was BBC World News, and they said, 'We need someone to explain what aquamation is, live on air in 30 minutes,'" she recalls.

The international press reacted to reports that Tutu - an anti-apartheid leader, Nobel Prize winner and Anglican archbishop emeritus who called climate change "one of the greatest moral challenges of our time" - had requested alkaline hydrolysis, also known as aquamation or water cremation, as an environmentally friendly way to dispose of his body, so the vice president of research at Bio-Response Solutions, the world's largest manufacturer of alkaline hydrolysis units for human remains,

In alkaline hydrolysis, the human body is placed in a long stainless steel chamber and a heated solution consisting of 95% water and 5% sodium hydroxide is passed around it. In low-temperature alkaline hydrolysis, the solution reaches a temperature just below boiling, the process occurs at atmospheric pressure, and the body shrinks within 14 to 16 hours; in a higher-temperature version of the process, when the temperature of the mixture reaches 300 degrees Fahrenheit and more pressure is created, the body shrinks in four to six hours. The process dissolves the bonds in the body tissues, and the end result is a sterile liquid combination of amino acids, peptides, salts, sugars and soaps that is disposed of down the drain in an alkaline hydrolysis unit. The bones of the body are then ground into a fine powder and returned to the surviving deceased, just as the bones left behind after cremation are returned to families in the form of ashes.

Alkaline hydrolysis is rarely seen today as a funeral practice for people. First offered to the public just over a decade ago, it is now legal and regulated in 26 U.S. states and practiced primarily in North America, where it remains unfamiliar to most people who have lost a loved one or are contemplating what might happen to their own body after death. Nevertheless, pioneers like Tutu are raising awareness of its possibilities, and proponents argue that we are long overdue for a change - "traditional" practices like embalming and cremation have been the standard in America for decades.

Invention of alkaline hydrolysis

On December 25, 1888, U.S. Patent No. 394,982 was issued to Amos Herbert Hobson, an Englishman who discovered that combining animal remains with an alkali, such as caustic potash, dissolved in water, then heating and stirring this mixture frequently for eight to ten hours was an excellent way to "get gelatin, glue and size" and create fertilizer. Hobson's method was a boon to farmers and irrelevant to modern funeral homes, which tended to be concerned with hindering rather than speeding up the decomposition process.

A century later, colleagues at Albany Medical College Gordon E. Kaye and Peter B. Weber again turned to Hobson's method to solve the radioactive rabbit dilemma. Kaye and Peter B. Weber again turned to Hobson's methodology to solve the dilemma of radioactive rabbits. They hypothesized that alkaline hydrolysis could recycle and aid in the safe disposal of animals used as research subjects, and when their research was successful, they applied for and received a patent in 1994. The inventors began building machines to implement their technique. In 1992, they installed the first such machine, then known as a "tissue digester," at Albany Medical College, and in 1995, they sold their first system for processing human remains donated for medical research to the University of Florida's Shands Hospital. As can be gleaned from the fact that they called the equipment a "tissue digester," Kaye and Weber's innovation had not yet been incorporated into funeral home operations.

Over the next decade, the Albany innovators sold and installed more than 75 alkaline hydrolysis machines; when their company closed in 2006, former president and CEO Joseph Wilson founded Bio-Response Solutions, and Sandy Sullivan, who headed the company's European subsidiary, formed Scotland-based Resomation Ltd. the following year.

Funeral homes are introducing water cremation of human remains

In 2010, Bio-Response Solutions took an order from an Ohio funeral director named Jeff Edwards. Edwards began offering alkaline hydrolysis services to his customers in early 2011, and that's when the dam burst. Since then, Resomation Ltd. and Bio-Response Solutions have produced every machine built and operated to dispose of human remains. In the U.S., that's more than 60 machines so far, with 86 machines expected to be in operation by the end of the year.

"Edwards is the guy who threw himself into the sacrificial pyre," notes funeral director Morris Pearson, whose family business, Pearson's Funeral Home, has been doing alkaline hydrolysis in Oregon since 2013. "He was the first person who wanted to have a car and talked Wilson into building one, and yes, he was the longest to stay in the fire."

After Edwards conducted 19 trials, state regulators stopped issuing him permits to dispose of bodies by alkaline hydrolysis. In March 2011, Edwards filed a lawsuit in court, arguing that he should be able to continue operating because no laws prohibited it; a Columbus judge dismissed his lawsuit a year later, ruling that the state had the right to decide. As of 2022, funeral homes in Ohio are still not allowed to dispose of human remains by alkaline hydrolysis. Edwards Funeral Home still offers this method, but they transport bodies to Missouri to do so.

"I felt like a fish in a barrel [working with regulators], and I can't even imagine what it's like to be completely shut down," Pearson says.

Although studies in the late 1990s showed that the liquid effluent produced by alkaline hydrolysis was safe for municipal sewage systems - indeed, waste managers were often convinced that it was beneficial to their treatment processes because it fed sewage-degrading bacteria - it was an unprecedented practice for most local officials to regulate. After obtaining the proper permits and conducting alkaline hydrolysis for two and a half months, Pearson was retested by the city's sanitation department and received an adjusted monthly sewer bill of $3,000 a month; after another round of tests, those costs dropped to $300 to $400 a month, which he considers a ridiculous amount for disposing of sterile material that turned out to be unremarkable. "You could theoretically drink this effluent," he notes. "I would never try it , but theoretically nothing would hurt you."

Environmental benefits of aquaplaning

One of the attractions of alkaline hydrolysis is that it speeds up the natural decomposition of a cadaver in the ground. "It's a chemical reaction where, under certain conditions, water molecules dissociate and disintegrate," Sieber explains. "In our system, we add heat, we add water flow, we add lye, and the lye actually causes the water molecules to split and move to break up the material."

This acceleration makes natural decomposition even better: as Kaye and Weber discovered in the '90s, it's an effective remediator for removing pollutants from the environment. "It's good at breaking down chemotherapy drugs and [any other] drugs that were in the body, and if people want to be embalmed, it breaks down embalming chemicals," Sieber explains. Each year, Americans bury about 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde along with embalmed loved ones.

According to the Berkeley Planning Journal, "Each year in the United States, chemicals and materials buried with bodies in a conventional burial include approximately 30 million board feet of hardwood, 2,700 tons of copper and bronze, 104,272 tons of steel, and 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete." Flaming cremations in America, in turn, release approximately 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, as well as toxic materials such as mercury. Alkaline hydrolysis consumes about 10 percent of the energy required to flame cremate a body, its equipment runs on electricity rather than fossil fuels, and emits no greenhouse gases.

Pearson, who has performed alkaline hydrolysis 1,700 times since 2013 and estimates that it now accounts for 52 percent of his total business, is confident that the technology's relatively light footprint will eventually give it widespread acceptance, despite the potential "annoyance factor" of a process that flushes byproducts down the drain. "We're going back to the building blocks of protein, and in doing so we're getting a byproduct that's good for the environment," he notes. Initially, consumers "react emotionally, not intellectually. But if you get them to reason intellectually, most people realize that [alkaline hydrolysis is] a much cleaner and better process [than cremation or burial in a coffin]. I mean, they just come to that conclusion on their own."

Gaining recognition as a funeral practice

Barbara Kemmis, executive director of the North American Cremation Association (CANA), has watched alkaline hydrolysis go from a novelty to a method legalized in half the states over the past decade. She estimates that this method of disposal currently accounts for less than a tenth of a percent of the nearly 2 million cremations occurring in the U.S. each year, or less than 2,000 disposals in 2021, but she's quick to put those numbers into context. "From the first cremation in 1876, it took a hundred years before the U.S. cremation rate reached 5 percent in 1972, and then it took less than 50 years before cremation reached 50 percent [ in 2016]," she says. "I don't know what share of the cremation market alkaline hydrolysis will take, but it's definitely growing faster than the popularity of flame cremation."

Kemmis is not alone in comparing alkaline hydrolysis to flame cremation. Bio-Response Solutions and Resomation Ltd. have trademarked "aquamation" and "water cremation" respectively, CANA expanded its definition of cremation to include alkaline hydrolysis in 2010, and all but two states that have passed regulatory laws to date have expanded their definitions in the same way. It is therefore difficult to say exactly how many bodies are processed in this way each year: burials by alkaline hydrolysis are counted among burials by cremation. Although the fuels, processes, and byproducts of processing are different, the remains that cremation and alkaline hydrolysis produce so that funeral homes can return them to their clients are actually remarkably similar. Alkaline hydrolysis yields "calcium phosphate [bones] without any residual DNA or biological material," Kemmis says. "These bones, like the bones removed from the retort (cremation chamber) after flame cremation, are usually ground into powder and returned to the urn.

Direct alkaline hydrolysis (that is, the remains are collected and processed unattended and then returned to a simple urn), like direct cremation, has the potential to be inexpensive - perhaps less than $500. However, as with any other form of burial, "it will be done through the commercial industry; it's their business, they need to make a profit, so the cost and labor will probably be passed on to the consumer," notes Sarah Chavez, executive director of the Order of the Good Death, "a group of funeral industry professionals, scholars and artists exploring ways to prepare a death-phobic culture for the inevitable passing of life." As noted in the National Funeral Directors Association's 2021 Price List Review, the average total cost of working with a funeral home in the U.S. includes a $2,300 non-discountable basic service fee that covers operating expenses.

At White Rose Aqua Cremation in Escondido, California - the first funeral home in the state to offer alkaline hydrolysis beginning February 2022 - the team's status determines their offerings. Clients can choose between alkaline hydrolysis and green burial (which minimizes environmental impact and conserves natural resources by avoiding toxic chemicals, non-biodegradable materials and the use of fossil fuels), but they do not offer traditional services, burials or embalming. This spring and summer, "we've had [religious] clients that I didn't expect," says funeral home manager Stephanie Poirier. "Although the Vatican remains silent on alkaline hydrolysis, some Catholics feel it's disrespectful to dispose of sewage. We've had Jewish families who usually prefer 'green' burials; they chose cremation in water."

Some of these clients ask Poirier and her coworkers how they would like to be treated after death. Poirier's family is not centered in one part of the country, and she once envisioned flame cremation for herself and her loved ones. But now? "Hands down, I choose water," she says. "In fact, two of my family members live in a state where this method is not available, and I've already looked into it: 'So, where is the closest state where it's available, just in case, or does it make sense to fly here?"'

While Chavez believes that flame cremation should be available as long as people want it and have a cultural or religious connection to the practice, she believes that more and more people are realizing the environmental damage that modern coffin burials and flame cremation cause. "They want their deaths to reflect the values they professed in life, which is respect and reverence for the planet, nature and the generations of people who will come after them," she notes. "And then many children of baby boomers begin to make funeral decisions that question the death practices of previous generations and see no point in an $8,500 funeral that has no meaning to them and also harms the environment." Aquamation offers an environmentally friendly alternative.

On July 12, Hawaii Governor David Ige signed into law the Alkaline Hydrolysis Act. This development is particularly gratifying for the employees of Aloha Mortuary, the only funeral home on Oahu owned by a Native Hawaiian. For the first time in generations, Native Hawaiians will be able to participate in traditional death rites.

"I'm very passionate about pushing for the legislative enactment of water cremation and am proud that it is now legal in Hawaii," says owner Kavehi Correa. "For Native Hawaiians, it allows for the preservation of the iwi [long bones]. For us, it's where mana [power/essence] resides and through which it is transmitted. It represents how we value life and our purpose on this planet. I believe that this technology, water cremation, is the future."