Ashes to ashes, body to syrup

It’s a choice we all must make: coffin or urn, burial or cremation.

This is not an industrial washing machine.

Before making a rash decision, consider the new alternative of having yourself, or a loved one, liquefied into a “brown syrup” that can be flushed down a toilet.

The Daily Mail has a good report on the latest in funeral home technology, and says Florida is the seventh U.S. state to legalize “chemical cremation.”

The good folks at Anderson-McQueen funeral home in St. Petersburg were quick to purchase an ’alkaline hydrolysis’ unit from a UK-based company.

The $300,000 machine works by immersing a body in a solution of water and potassium hydroxide, which is then pressurised and heated to 356 degrees Fahrenheit for about three hours.

The result? A few pints of green-brown tinted liquid containing amino acids, peptides, sugars and salts and soft, porous white bone remains which are easily crushed, says the Daily Mail.

The crushed bone can be returned to next of kin as ashes; the syrupy mixture can be applied to a memorial garden or “simply put into the sewerage system,” which should boost the sale of water purifiers.

Resomation Ltd, manufacturer of the machine, claims the system reduces cremation greenhouse gas emissions by 35 percent, and that mercury emissions – typically released from dental fillings when burned – are eliminated.

The process — dubbed “resomation” — is legal in Florida, Minnesota, Maryland, Oregon, Kansas, Colorado and Maine, according to ABC News.

Company founder Sandy Sullivan said: “Let’s face it – there’s no nice way to go.”

“If you stood in front of a cremation, with the flames and heat, it seems violent. You go next door and the resomation is quiet.”

“We’re using the exact same chemistry that’s carried out by bacteria but instead of happening over months and years, it happens in three hours.”