“They will cook in a bag”: the British were offered to hold an ecological funeral

In the UK, an exotic and environmentally friendly novelty has appeared in the funeral business: the dead are offered to be “boiled in a bag”. With less carbon dioxide emissions than gas cremation, the process is described as “more gentle on the body and better on the environment.”

For those uneasy at the thought of their body being consumed by flames or buried in an insect-infested grave, a new burial option is about to emerge – “water cremation,” writes The Guardian.

The process of dissolving a body in a bag in alkaline-treated water at 160°C will become available in the UK later this year and will be the first new legal method of disposing of corpses since the 1902 Cremation Act. This has been described as a “boil in a bag” funeral.

The practice is legal in most US states, Canada and South Africa, where it was chosen for Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died last year. It is also legal in the UK, but has only been used in limited trials to see if the resulting solution was safe to enter the drainage system.

Because carbon dioxide emissions are said to be about half that of gas cremation, the process leaves behind only the bones, which are then ground into a powder and returned to the family in the same manner as cremated ashes.

Proponents describe this way of treating the dead as “more gentle on the body and more environmentally friendly”, and the UK’s largest funeral supplies manufacturer Co-op Funeralcare is likely to start offering it in the North East of England, where former undertaker Julian Atkinson installed the necessary equipment.

Northumbrian Water has issued a permit to send the resulting water back to the drainage network as “industrial effluent”, the same permit used by laundromats.

“We are satisfied that disposal will not have any impact on our wastewater treatment processes,” the water company said.

The survey showed that almost no one in the British public had heard of the practice, but after being told, just under a third (29%) said they would choose the method – also known as resomation, aquamatization or alkaline hydrolysis – for their own funeral, if it were available.

“By starting to make this practice available in the UK, Co-op will give people another option on how they will leave this world because this natural process uses water rather than fire, making it gentler on the body and friendly to the environment. Julian Atkinson said. “We are encouraged by the fact that many members of the public are aware of the need to reduce carbon emissions even after death.”

Conventional cremation releases 245 kg of carbon, resulting in 115,150 tons of carbon emissions annually in the UK, according to the CDS group, a crematorium consultancy. This is equivalent to the amount of electricity needed to power 65,000 households.

Burial would have taken place as usual, with the body in a coffin, but for water cremation, it would have been wrapped in a woolen shroud and placed in a “bio-bag” made from cornstarch. The body is then placed in a sealed chamber with 95% water and the remaining potassium hydroxide and heated to approximately 160°C. After four hours, everything but the skeleton should have dissolved.

Following testing in 2020, Yorkshire Water agreed to discharge the solution into a conventional drainage system after analysis showed no risk and no DNA was found in the samples. The solution is modified to balance its pH before it is dumped, “over time returning to the natural water cycle,” the cooperative said in a statement.

“The UK has a history of innovation when it comes to the compassionate, practical and hygienic management of the disposal of bodies after death,” said Professor Douglas Davies from Durham University’s Department of Theology and Religion. “The popularity of cremation grew throughout the 20th century and overtook burial as the preferred method of burying people in the 1960s.”