Belgian plans to liquify corpses and pour them down the drain

IT’S being promoted as the environmentally friendly option – undertakers in Belgium plan to do away with traditional burials and cremations and start dissolving corpses instead.

Remains would be given to relatives to flush away as a final goodbye.

Or authorities could flush them into the sewage, rather than running a crematorium or using up land for graves.

The departed would go into the sewage systems of towns and cities and then be recycled in water processing plants.

Some people might associate the novel method of human corpse disposal with horror movies or gangland murders. But the renowned US Mayo Clinic, Canada and several American states have been doing this for some years and now authorities in Belgium, Scotland, England and the Netherlands are interested too.

The process is known as resomation and is being promoted by Glasgow-based Sandy Sullivan, who points out the process is completely natural.

“It uses the same bio-chemistry as in natural decomposition when a body is buried, but it is quicker and much more environmentally friendly,” he says.

When bodies are buried, nature produces bacteria that breaks down the tissue and reduces bone to dust over time.

Mr Sullivan said bodies are treated in a chamber with potassium hydroxide at high pressure and raised to a temperature of 180C.

A funeral using resomation would be exactly the same as for a cremation, and the steel container even looks like a cremator but there is no mercury, dioxin or CO2 emitted into the atmosphere and it uses less energy.

In fact, Mr Sullivan estimates, compared with a regular funeral and cremation service, resomation’s carbon footprint is 35% less, while the process itself is four times less harmful to the environment.

All that is left is some liquid that is safe enough to be flushed away into the sewage system, and a small quantity of ash that is fine and pure white from the bones that can be placed in an urn.

“We have manufactured a few units for Canada and the US and it works beautifully. The UK Cremation Society has changed its 134-year-old Charter to allow their members use resomation,” he said.

Mr Sullivan admits that he has to overcome some hurdles in Britain yet before the process is freely available – such as the law that says all bodies must be placed in a coffin – since timber cannot be used in the resomation unit.

He is currently working with a company to build coffins from other materials. “We have some options we are looking at now,” he said.

But he is delighted that following a conference in the Netherlands a few weeks ago, undertakers in Flanders, the northern part of Belgium, have approached their officials to have regulations changed to allow it.

The European Commission says they have looked at the process because of the possible effect of the chemicals and residue on the sewage system and on the environment.

Spokesman Joe Hennon said: “It looks normal, much the same chemicals you would find coming from a washing machine. Our only interest is to ensure that the proper sewage treatment facilities are in place but we have no role in funerals – that is purely a matter for member states.”

Frederik Vanbellingen, an undertaker in Flanders, told Sky News he thought the new technique would fail to catch on.

“In Belgium it will be hard to introduce. We know about cremation, but not this new process,” he said.

“I think a solution to the problem of the fluid also needs to be found. Relatives could find pouring their loved ones away psychologically difficult.”