The machine is mid-cycle, emitting a low hum like a lawnmower several gardens away. It’s a rectangular box as big as a van, and its stainless steel panels neatly hide pipes, a panel of flashing lights and fuses, and the cylindrical tank that holds the body. All that’s visible from the outside is a touchscreen and four lit-up buttons: three green, one red. Bodies enter through the same kind of circular steel door that Britain’s defense ministry uses on nuclear submarines.

Fisher, gray-haired and beaming in light-green scrubs, says I can step outside if it all gets to be too much, but it’s not actually that terrible. The human body, liquefied, smells like steamed clams.

In 2015, the popularity of cremation fractionally outpaced burial in the US for the first time in history—but few ask what it entails. They don’t know that an hour into the process, a crematory operator will open the door and use a rake to hook the skeleton by the ribs and move it around to ensure the whole body is touched by flame. They don’t know that, despite the best efforts of crematory operators, bone dust catches in the bricks of the retort (the chamber in which the deceased is burned); cross-­contamination of bodies is inevitable. Instead of chemicals leaking out into the soil, they end up in the clouds.

Alkaline hydrolysis avoids all that. It was conceived in the mid-’90s to solve Albany Medical College’s problem of research rabbit disposal—the bodies were radioactive and therefore could not be burned or buried affordably—and in 2003 Minnesota became the first US state to allow its use on human remains. (The business of body disposal is highly regulated at the state level, and authorities are generally wary of novelty.) In the years since, a growing number of independent funeral homes have added alkaline hydrolysis to their list of services, and last October, California became one of a dozen or so states to legalize it. Jack Ingraham, CEO of Qico, a San Diego startup that’s joined the two established players in the field—the UK’s Resomation (creator of Fisher’s machine) and Bio-Response Solutions in Indiana—expects Utah to be next, with more states to follow as awareness spreads and demand grows. “Our goal is that, in 10 or 20 years, the term ‘cremation’ will be thought of entirely as a water-based process,” he says.

One obstacle to wider-spread adoption: Big Funeral needs to back it, and according to Fisher, who was a funeral director before working in body donation, industry leaders have been reluctant to offer it for a simple reason: “Money,” he says. “The big corporations—Service Corporation International, Carriage, Stewart Enterprises—have set up ­billion-dollar models to sell you a casket, give you a ride to the cemetery in that hearse, sell you the cemetery plot, and put up the marker.” Alkaline hydrolysis doesn’t require any of that.

On a small blue towel, below buckets of teeth and fillings (teeth are separated from bones—metal fillings aren’t biodegradable and could break the cremulator in which the bones are ground into powder), is a collection of metal hip joints, valves, stents that propped open the chambers of hearts, pins, plates: things that remain on the tray after the flesh around them has disappeared. The process is gentle enough to render a hernia mesh as new as the day the surgeon implanted it, but strong enough to bleach the color out of glass eyes and fake fingernails.

Fisher motions to the array of pace­makers he’s collected. Aside from the few he’s saved, he has all the metal recycled. The money he gets from the refiners goes toward an annual memorial service for all donor patients as well as the servicing of the machine; he says it ends up paying for its own upkeep. He flips a pacemaker over and holds it in front of my face. “If you look at all this, you can still read the label. You can’t put these in a crematory. You have to cut them out.”

In a crematory retort, prosthetics melt or burn or, in the case of a pacemaker’s lthium-ion battery, explode. Titanium ball-and-socket hip joints don’t come out polished like a pristine mirror as they do in Fisher’s cupboard, they come out battered with carbon. The silicon breast implant that Fisher jiggles in his hand (“We call them jellyfish”) has already spent a good few years inside a woman and four hours inside the machine, but would melt like gum in a crematory. Other implants, like plastic urinary pessaries or penile pumps, would never even be seen by a crematory worker. They melt and escape into the atmosphere through the chimney along with the mercury in your teeth.

In the corner of the room, the Resomator’s cycle is nearing its end. The noise is more intense; the pump beats like a straining heart. Fisher lets me press the red button to open the door, and Alex Rodriguez, Fisher’s right-hand man, swings it open. There on the tray, amid steam, lies the skeleton of a 90-year-old woman who donated her body to the medical school. Rodriguez delicately picks up the larger bones and places them in a tray. As he does so, he tells me what he knows about her from her bones alone: that she had no teeth when she died, because there are none here. That she had osteo­porosis, which turns your bones to dust before the cremulator. That she was small.

If you’re interested in donating your body one day, Fisher will explain alkaline hydrolysis to you personally. He’ll stand you in front of this silver machine and tell you exactly how it works. And later, he will slide you in, quickly and quietly turning your body back into the biological blocks that built you.

https://www.wired.com/story/alkaline-hydrolysis-liquid-biocremation/

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