A great way to combine funeral service and home economics programs at vocational schools!

Now, here’s a way to use those old pressure cookers and leftover Drano between canning seasons!

New Morgue Science: Dissolving Bodies With

Lye

Process Includes Heat, Pressure in Steel Containers

 

 

CONCORD, N.H. — Since they first walked the planet, humans have either buried or burned their dead. Now a new option is generating interest — dissolving bodies in lye and flushing the brownish, syrupy residue down the drain. The process is called alkaline hydrolysis and was developed in this country 16 years ago to get rid of animal carcasses. It uses lye, 300-degree heat and 60 pounds of pressure per square inch to destroy bodies in big stainless-steel cylinders that are similar to pressure cookers. 

No funeral homes in the U.S. — or anywhere else in the world, as far as the equipment manufacturer knows — offer it. In fact, only two U.S. medical centers use it on human bodies, and only on cadavers donated for research. 

But because of its environmental advantages, some in the funeral industry say it could someday rival burial and cremation. ” It’s not often that a truly game-changing technology comes along in the funeral service,” the newsletter Funeral Service Insider said in September. But “we might have gotten a hold of one.”

more here

Frankly, any technology that keeps a funeral home from selling you a septic tank without holes to preserve your corpse and turning usable land into a minefield of concrete and metal boxes is a game changing technology.

Knowing the funeral industry lobby, though, there’ll probably be laws in most states requiring families to purchase Elvis souvenir decanters to house their new liquid assets.

On the bright side, this stuff could be marketed as diet pancake syrup or drambuie. I’ve even got a label: Soylent Brown.