JustASC

The search for a greener burial has yielded this new technique, called “promession,” from Sweden:

The dearly departed are first supercooled in liquid nitrogen to about minus 196°C, then shattered into very small pieces on a vibration table. “….

Next a vacuum is used to evaporate moisture while a metal separator, traditionally used by the food processing industry to remove stray foreign objects from meat products, shuffles aside fillings, crowns, titanium hips, and so on. (You can put that sandwich down now.) Finally, the vaguely pink crumbs are deposited in a large box made of corn or potato starch.

Surviving family members bury the box in shallow topsoil and plant a tree or shrub on top.

What is the ecological footprint of all these industrial-seeming processes, anyway? The Walrus, which reported the new technique, discusses the ecological drawbacks of current funerary practices: Chemically embalmed bodies buried in graves dug by internal combustion machines in perpetually landscaped cemeteries; or cremation performed in a cloud of propane gas and noxious fumes.

Maybe the Jewish way is the greenest: no embalming, no cremation, no “promessing,” just a simple shroud and a plain pine box.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 3:36 pm and is filed under JustASC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.