A New Alternative to Burial and Cremation
End of Life Care is a $20B a year industry in the US. It would be fair to say that it is not an environmentally sound industry as it is currently embodied. In this article, we will discuss a few newer environmentally sound methods to deal with death (traditional societies have many environmentally sound methods which are illegal in the US).
Recently, Katrina Spade and her company Recompose have introduced a new method of body composting and have managed to get the law changed in Washington State to allow this new method. Her method is basically body composting in a specially built chamber.
A longer-established alternative method to deal with the bodies of the deceased is alkaline hydrolysis, which hydrolyzes bodies to their components such as amino acids and nucleic acids. In this method, a strong base such as sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide is used to hydrolize the body at an elevated temperature. The bones become quite brittle because the collagen that binds the bones together is dissolved in this method. In conventional alkaline hydrolysis, the liquid hydrolyzate is typically flushed down the sanitary sewer or dumped at sea. I have been working on a modification of this method that would involve composting the hydrolyzate.
I am suffering from ALS, which brings my mortality into focus. I am also a chemist and a chemical engineer, and I was a lifelong gardener before I got sick. I have applied my knowledge and skills to this problem. I have to admit that my prejudice is part of the reason why I don’t prefer either of the previous methods.
I do not find it appealing to be buried or composted because I know what happens to the body during decomposition. Although the end product may be compost, there are intermediate stages of putrification that I find disturbing to think about. Alkaline hydrolysis is more appealing for that reason, but the idea of having my molecules flushed down the toilet bothers me greatly. As a result, I have come up with a method of alkaline hydrolysis that is more appealing to me and perhaps to some others as well.
I have sought to create an alkaline hydrolysis method which preserves the bone strength much more so than conventional alkaline hydrolysis. I know this isn’t going to be appealing to everyone, but I would prefer my bones to remain intact. I also very much want my body to be composted but not go through the intermediate putrification step. Therefore, I have designed a milder hydrolysis method based on use of a less basic compound tripotassium phosphate. The resulting hydrolyzate can be optimized for nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus levels to create an optimized compost for gardening or planting a tree.
My method is in effect a mashup of the two prior methods discussed above. I am not hostile in any way to these other methods of handling a body in an environmentally sound way, I just have different preferences that lead me to develop this method. I am looking for an entrepreneurial person that might want to take an interest in this idea. I did file a patent because that’s what I do, but for this to move forward, I need to find an entrepreneurial partner on this idea.
