Crematorium burns bodies to generate power

EAST SUSSEX, ENGLAND - A crematorium is planning to use energy from burning bodies to run its own electricity and heating.

Hastings Borough Council in East Sussex says it would be the first in Europe to invest in technology which converts excess heat from cremations into reusable energy.

It hopes new generators, being installed next summer as part of an £800,000 refit, will save money in the long run by cutting energy bills.

Hastings Borough Council amenities manager Peter Mead said the recycled power would not come directly from the bodies but from the machines used to cremate them and filter the fumes.

He said: “A crematorium uses vast amounts of energy. We buy about £25,000 worth of gas a year. Clearly we want to be as energy efficient as we can be.

“The first part would be to use that heat, but the second stage is to use it to generate electricity.

“They need to first see whether it will technically work, but if it does it would be the first in the UK or Europe.”

Cremation is popular these days for those who have kicked the bucket. In Canada, only 3 per cent of the population got cremated 50 years ago, while today that number has ballooned to more than 55 per cent. But hereÂ’s a shocker for the conservation-minded: The amount of natural gas and electricity used to cremate one body is the equivalent of driving a car from coast to coast. When your body goes up in flames, it also emits a lot of nasty stuff: greenhouse gases, smog-causing gases, particulates, and mercury vapour if youÂ’ve got a few of those old tooth fillings.

Given this post-humus environmental footprint — and given our concern about climate change — innovation in this area is on the rise. In Denmark and Sweden, some municipalities are taking the waste heat from their local crematoriums and using it as part of their district heating systems. In North America, there’s a new technology called Resomation — generically, biocremation — that avoids incineration by chemically breaking down the body.

A Toronto-based company called Transition Science Inc. has licensed the technology and recently signed up its first customer, cemetery and crematorium operator Park Lawn Trust, which plans to have its first Resomation system up and running in Toronto next spring.

It’s kind of yucky — basically the body is loaded into a metal chamber that’s filled with an alkali-based solution that, under heat and pressure, turns the non-skeleton portion of the body into a soapy soup that’s simply flushed down the drain (apparently it’s benign and gets treated in our wastewater treatment system just like what we flush down the toilet). The process uses a fraction of the energy required for cremation.

Sure, sounds gross, but since weÂ’re always talking about the need for cradle-to-grave energy analyses, it makes sense that we leave the world in the most energy-efficient way possible.