last updated 6th January 06
By 4ecotips

Deep freeze corpse disposal is cheapest

This year, Jonkoping, in Sweden, plans to become the first place in the world where corpses will be disposed of by freeze-drying, as an environmentally friendly alternative to cremation or burial. So the town's crematorium is to be turned into a so-called promatorium.

Swedes will then have the chance to bury their dead according to the pioneering method, which involves freezing the body, dipping it in liquid nitrogen and gently vibrating it to shatter it into powder. This is put into a small box made of potato or corn starch and placed in a shallow grave, where it will disintegrate within six to 12 months.

People are to be encouraged to plant a tree on the grave. It would feed off the compost formed from the body, to emphasise the organic cycle of life.

The national burial law is currently being updated to accommodate a practice that is expected to spread across the country over the next few years.

The technique was conceived by a Swedish biologist, Susanne Wiigh-Masak, who says: "Mulching was nature's original plan for us, and that's what used to happen to us at the start of humanity - we went back into the soil.

"But we need to tell people in this day and age that this can once again be a dignified and comfortable option." According to Susanne's method, which she has called "promession" - the promise to return to the earth what emerged from the earth - the dead body is frozen and dried, using liquid nitrogen.

A mechanical vibration then causes the body to fall apart within 60 seconds before a vacuum removes the water. Then a metal separator picks out metals such as artificial hips and dental fillings.

Jonkoping's motivation for converting its crematorium into a promatorium is mainly practical. According to European environmental laws, it faced a multi-million pound bill for the installation at its 50-year-old crematorium of a new gas-cleaning system and furnace. The alternative was the much cheaper conversion and a more environmentally friendly procedure.

Promession is a way of taking care of human remains with highest dignity in order to make mulching possible. "The original plan" for a human body was to fall to the ground, where animals and microorganisms would help break it down. In a civilised world this is not possible and through history we made the treatment of dead bodies very complicated. No wonder, because we are one of the big mammals and not very easy to handle. Technical developments today finally provide us a method that is allowing is to do something that is as close to the "original plan" as possible.