A West Midlands council wants to use high-tech methods for less wasteful burials – what are the most environmentally friendly ways to take care of cadavers?

From liquid burials to corpse compost: the eco-innovators finding new ways to dispose of the dead

Dying is easy enough. Like falling off a log, really. In some cases not even “like”. But the decomposition of a human body? Not so simple.

In fact, it turns out most of us have been doing it wrong for years now. In an eco age, both burial (which releases methane, 21 times more harmful than CO2), and cremation (calculated to use 2,000 cubic feet of natural gas and 4 kilowatt-hours of electricity per body) have downsides.

Recognising quite how stunted our imagination is on the subject, a new generation of options are being developed, often by starry-eyed death entrepreneurs.

This week, Sandwell council in the West Midlands announced it would like to become the first to offer “liquid burial”, via a £300,000 “Resomator”.

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Cadaver disposal in the Resomator would be as easy as stepping into a “torpedo-shaped” bath of an alkaline solution, heated to 152C, and, after simmering a while, the chamber is reduced to a nice bouillabaisse – “a tea-coloured liquid” which can be harmlessly flushed into the local water system. Although a Water UK source told the Sunday Times it had concerns about the public acceptance of the liquefied remains of the dead going into the water system.

Burial at sea is the old-fashioned version of that, but, with special licenses and 200kg of concrete or steel needed to weight the coffin, this is estimated to cost twice as much as any normal burial (around £4,000).

Leaving your body to science? Doable, but it might be worth thinking beyond just med students. At Texas State University, the largest “body farm” in the world, on Freeman Ranch, averages 70 corpses a time, deliberately left outdoors to rot down naturally, often via wild animal feasts, to better understand the process of decomposition and with the wider aim of improving forensic science. A British version has been proposed, but confirmation is still pending.

Katrina Spade’s Seattle-based Urban Death Project is attempting to turn people into compost. The process is modelled on an animal version used in agriculture. Feed around 60 bodies in at the top of a three-storey unit, and over four weeks, a rich loamy compost should emerge at the bottom end. Families are given a symbolic urn of soil to take home.

Is Spade simply gilding the lily, though? The fact is, good results can be achieved if we just give up on our precious subterranean six feet. The harmful methane buildup can’t develop if we’re instead buried in very shallow graves, wrapped only in a biodegradable shroud.

Perhaps, rather than just coming up with endless new tech solutions, we should also think about why we still resent the messy, David Attenborough-narrated part of returning to the food chain.