Walter White got it all wrong. If you want to chemically dissolve a body, as the Breaking Bad protagonist ordered his partner Jesse Pinkman to early in the series, you don't just dump it in a bathtub full of acid. "They should have used an alkaline, like potassium hydroxide," says Samantha Seiber, vice president of research at Bio-Response Solutions. On the show, the body dissolved in a few days. "In real life that method would have taken months, without heat, without water circulation," she says. "Watching that was extremely frustrating to me." That's because getting rid of bodies is Seiber's family business.

Bio-Response, based in Danville, Indiana, specializes in building machines for liquid cremation, a fast, environmentally-friendly, and controversial method for disposing of the deceased. Only a handful of states have legalized the practice. The latest battle is taking place in Nevada, where yesterday the state's legislature held a hearing to discuss AB205, a bill that would legalize the chemical dissolution of the dead. Liquid cremation's biggest opponents are typically religious groups, who believe uninhabited corporeal vessels ought not be liquefied and sent spiraling down a drain. Which is a fair, if oversimplified interpretation, of how this process actually works.

Liquid cremation—or, as folks in the biz call it, alkaline hydrolysis—originated in the late 1800s as a way to turn dead livestock into plant food. A century later, a pair of researchers at Albany Medical College adapted the process to liquefy human remains. Early adopters included large research facilities seeking a quick, clean way to get rid of donated cadavers that had, uh, outlived their usefulness. The University of Florida installed the first system 22 years ago. But with legal opposition from heavyweights like the Catholic Church, only 13 states have legalized the practice so far.

Bio-Response

Liquefying a body is a chemical reaction involving water, heat, and some sort of alkaline agent—potassium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide are popular choices. "If you think back to high school chemistry, water has a neutral pH of 7," says Dean Fisher, director of UCLA's Donated Body Program. Hydrogen is the workhorse of dissolving the chemical bonds holding a body's molecules together, and even neutral water has enough of the stuff to break down flesh, if given enough time. Alkalines—the opposite of acids—have a higher pH, and catalyze the water to attack those chemical bonds much more quickly. The machines also keep the water flowing, another crucial factor that Walter White screwed up.

And of course, the machines make sure the dissolving bath stays nice and hot. "Heat in every sense speeds up decomposition," says Seiber. "It's the same reason you don’t leave a bologna sandwich with mayo out in the sun, which I’ve done before." BioResponse's two models offer different heat settings for human remains. (The company also makes machines for cremating pets.) They look basically the same: a 10 foot by four foot stainless steel cylinder covered in pipes and nozzles attached by hoses to tanks, all propped up on a trapezoidal dolly—large enough to hold a 500-pound body. "The difference between the machines is the temperatures they operate at, and the time it takes for them to complete the process," she says. The low heat, 208 ˚F models take about 14 to 16 hours for one body. The other machine, which is pressurized to prevent its solution from boiling, operates at around 302 ˚F. At that temperature, bones slough flesh in four to six hours.

In the end, just bones remain—plus any pacemakers, orthopedic implants, and detritus from plastic surgery. "You see fake fingernails, glass eyes, dental fillings, mercury, and gold, all that stuff can be recycled," says Fisher. The bones themselves are pristine, if a bit brittle. These get passed along to a machine called a cremulator, which pulverizes the bone into an ashy powder, which gets passed along to the dead's family. This is similar to how cremation by fire works, except the bony remains are quite charred by the time they come out of the kiln. Plus, the fire doesn't make them quite as brittle, so they don't pulverize to as fine a powder as does the chemical method.

What of the flesh? It's true, it all goes down the drain. "It looks like a weak coffee, like a light roast color," says Seiber. The color comes from the body's pigments. But it's not sludgy like you might expect (and, in fact would be the result if you were to use acid, like Jesse Pinkman did). The machine flushes the liquefied body along with about 285 gallons of the water/alkaline solution used to dissolve it. That might sound like a lot of water, but it's less that person would have used during just three days while alive.

This coffee-colored stuff drains to the wastewater treatment plant. Which is why, every time Seiber sells a new machine, she spends weeks, perhaps months, of permitting with local governmental agencies to ensure that the output from the liquid cremation operation isn't pumping toxins or disease back into the system. "The pH is reduced so the liquid is treated to whatever the authority wants it reduced to right inside the system," says Seiber. And overall, the system is way more eco-friendly than either burial or cremation by fire. It requires no embalming chemicals (besides the ones the family might have requested to preserve the body for a funeral or viewing), and emits a quarter of the carbon produced by fire cremation. Also, it won't burn the mercury in certain dental fillings. However, beginning the afterlife with a clean conscience will cost you: Seiber says alkaline hydrolysis costs roughly $500 more than traditional cremation—which can range between $1,500 to $4,000.

Under Nevada's proposed law, any crematories using an alkaline hydrolysis machine would have to go through the state's Division of Environmental Protection and make sure any liquid they produced wasn't polluting the local supply. And because alkaline hydrolysis has such a smaller environmental footprint, the law would allow any liquid-only crematories to operate in residential zones. Liquid cremation isn’t legal in Indiana, where Seiber’s family’s business is located. After her grandparents died—and were cremated the old fashioned way—Bio-Resources spent $30,000 on a failed lobbying attempt to try and get the state’s government to legalize alkaline hydrolysis. Not that business is bad; the company has sold more than 20 human machines, and about a hundred for pets.

Seiber gets called every so often from legislators considering bills to legalize liquid cremation. And she says the number one question she gets has nothing to do with the ethics of flushing a dissolved body down the drain. "They want to make sure nobody does with our machines what Jesse did to that drug dealer in the bathtub," she says—covering up the traces of a murder. Sure, no DNA or RNA is left after alkaline hydrolysis, which she counters there are plenty of less expensive (and traceable—after all, she does keep invoices) ways to get rid of a body. Still, she can't get that fictional botched acid bath off her mind. "They had the right chemicals out in their trailer the whole time."