Dean Fisher is standing in a sterile room on the campus of UCLA, a silicone implant in one hand and a hernia mesh in the other. There’s a futuristic, giant metal machine behind him, sealed with the same type of door that’s used on British nuclear submarines; not far away are a handful of barrels, and they’re filled with potassium hydroxide.
Both of the items in Dean’s hands have been through the machine and washed with the potassium hydroxide. They’ve also been inside of people, but the bodies of those individuals – unlike the mesh and silicone – were almost totally dissolved in the very same gleaming machine just a few feet away.
This machine is called a Resomator, and its purpose is to dispose of human remains in a dignified, efficient and relatively gentle manner. Dean is the director of UCLA’s Donated Body Program, and it’s here that donors end up after they’ve been studied for medical research. Rather than burying or cremating the donors with flame, UCLA employs a process known as alkaline hydrolysis, which goes by a number of colloquial names: green cremation, biocremation, flameless cremation and, in the case of UCLA’s machine, Resomation – which is patented and refers to the process when it’s been conducted by this particular, branded apparatus.
The Resomator is at the forefront of the increasingly popular and progressive method of alkaline hydrolysis. It’s a different type of cremation, employing water and chemicals instead of flame and intense heat. Alkaline hydrolysis essentially liquidizes most of the flesh and body but leaves the bones in a white phosphorus form that crumbles to the touch. As with flame cremation, the remnants are put into a cremulator, which refines the final remains into an ash-like substance. Resomation yields 33 percent more ash than flame cremation, Mr Fisher tells DailyMail.com.
‘We say it’s just like regular flame cremation, except for instead of using natural gas and high heat, we use water and potassium hydroxide,’ says Mr Fisher, who began his career as a funeral director and spent 20 years at the Mayo Clinic before accepting a job at UCLA in 2008.
Dean Fisher, director of the Donated Body Program at UCLA, shows off the Resomator machine, which uses a combination of water and chemicals to dissolve tissue into liquid and leaves bone in white phosphorus form that crumbles
While pacemakers and other medical implants must be removed prior to flame cremation – because the high temperatures can cause batteries to explode – they are left intact by biocremation and be recycled
The UCLA program recycles most of the medical devices, from hernia mesh to hip and knee implants, and uses the money to fund the upkeep of its Resomator machine
The bone remnants are dried and put through a cremulator, which turns them into ash – and families receive 33 percent more from this process than regular flame cremation
The body is placed on a tray and put into the circular, sleek stainless steel machine, melting away in about four hours. The liquid left at the end is sterile and sent to municipal water treatment plants. The 270 gallons of liquid left at the end of the process are collected in an accumulation tank and acid is added to bring its pH level down to a more neutral level acceptable to Los Angeles authorities – before a valve automatically opens to send the liquid to the city’s treatment facilities.
‘The actual water is completely sterile, since we heated that up to 302 degrees,’ he says. ‘it’s just like autoclave technology, like what a doctor uses to clean his instruments. Doctors clean at 250 degrees for a minimum of 20 minutes, so that way the next patient doesn’t catch any disease. This heats up for a minimum of one hour, and we’re heating to 302 degrees Fahrenheit – so we’re destroying pathogens at 60,000 times greater than what a doctor’s office does or a dentist’s office, just to give you that idea.
‘We have people all over the world that are living with certain diseases like hepatitis, tuberculosis, those types of things, also HIV – and every day, the first thing that they do is they go to the bathroom, they shower, they brush their teach, and all of that is treated’ by authorities, he says. ‘This is actually sterile going back to them. When you do that in your home, that isn’t sterile going back to them. They can treat that, so this can easily be treated also.’
At UCLA, many of ashes are scattered over the Pacific and the donors are memorialized in an annual ceremony.
The process, Dean argues, has various benefits over flame cremation. First of all, it’s more convenient; items such as pacemakers must be removed before flame cremation – so the batteries don’t explode in the heat that can reach 1600 degrees Fahrenheit – but remain intact after undergoing biocremation. They can be salvaged and the metal recycled to help with service costs of the machine.
The Crematory Association of North America (Dean is a board member) added alkaline hydrolysis in 2010 to its definition of cremation, including it as a variant of the process. The method is only legal in about a dozen states, and California’s government is currently debating the issue; some states recognize it as a third method of disposition, separate from cremation and burial.
In California, UCLA is allowed to use the machine because it is a research facility and subsequently has a medical waste permit, versus being in the funeral and cemetery industry, Mr Fisher says.
‘There’s the drying process at the end, because the bone comes out damp so we have to dry the bone, but other than that, it’s very similar to cremation and all of the step and all of the processes,’ Mr Fisher says. ‘And that’s why CANA accepted it, also.’
To the average person, he says: ‘That’s how we describe it – that it’s very similar to plain cremation, only instead of using fire, we use water and a chemical to dissolve the body, instead of burning the flesh off the body.
‘People embrace it, because instead of at 1400 to 1600 degrees, we only heat up to 302 degrees – so it’s a kinder, gentler process. Also, it’s like a whirlpool bath … that’s effectively going on inside of the pressure vessel as we’re actually running a cycle. So people do embrace it.’
‘Gentler’ is a word that seems to come up frequently when it comes to this method of disposition. During the process of flame cremation, operators use a rake halfway through to stoke the remains; there is none of that disturbance with biocremation, and people seem mollified by anything that’s less invasive.
Proponents of biocremation also point to its environmental benefits and the elimination of mercury emissions, a 75 per cent reduction of carbon footprint and 1/8 of the use of energy consumed by flame cremation.
‘The average person has three grams of mercury in their mouth placed by dentists,’ Mr Fisher tells DailyMail.com. ‘Mercury normally evaporates into the atmosphere around 670 degrees … so crematories that are running at 1400 to 1600 degrees, they’re putting a lot of mercury into the atmosphere – where with us, we’re not. We can capture that filling, and we can take that tooth that has mercury in it, and we can give that to our environmental health and safety inspectors here, and they put that in a safe place when they’re done with it so that it isn’t going into the atmosphere.’
He also adds: ‘With flame cremation, anything that’s a polycarbonate or is plastic, that’s going to go right up into the atmosphere also, which creates more CO2 gas.’
The Resomator was the brainchild of Sandy Sullivan, a Glaswegian who previously worked for a company that focused on using alkaline hydrolysis to dissolve the bodies of animals
The first machine Mr Fisher ordered, while he was working at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, did not work but was fixed by Mr Sullivan, and he decided UCLA needed one, as well, because the process is ‘gentler’ and less noticeable on campus
The Resomator dissolves bodies at a temperature of 302 degrees Fahrenheit, which is much lower than flame cremation, which ranges from 1400 to 1600 degrees; the biocremation process usually takes about four hours
The machine self-regulates weight, temperature and pressure as the body dissolves; technicians do not need to interfere with the process – whereas flame cremation usually requires remains to be moved and adjusted with a rake about halfway through
Mr Fisher marvels at how the finished liquid product following Resomation is sterile; he points out that, after heating the finished product to 302 degrees Fahrenheit, pathogens are destroyed at a level ‘60,000 times greater’ than the sterilization process conducted by a doctor or dentist
When it comes to dirt burial, he explains, ‘any implant that’s like titanium, any of those things … with earth burial it’ll end up in the ground water.
The cremation industry itself has already been undergoing rapid change in recent years; according to CANA statistics, the cremation rate in the United States jumped from 26.2 percent in 2000 to 48.6 percent in 2015. Jason Bradshaw, president of the Bradshaw Group of funeral homes in Minnesota, says that, as biocremation makes inroads in the crematory world, ‘At the same time, you have a lot of folks that are still getting used to the big change in cremation.’
In Minnesota alone, he points out that the cremation rate has jumped from 15 percent in 1990 to 61 percent last year.
Mr Bradshaw’s family business purchased a Resomator about five years ago, and he’s been taken aback by the popularity of the method with customers; between 70 and 80 percent of families who choose cremation are opting for the new method now, he says.
‘What we find is that most people, their first impression is that it sounds more gentle,’ he says. ‘And we actually figured that the environment was going to be the main reason people chose it; what’s interesting is more people choose it [because] it sounds like a gentler process.’
He adds: ‘It’s actually been a bit surprising; we did do a focus group up front that said people would like it, but we were surprised to be between 70 and 80 percent for something so new. I’m very pleased.’
The costs of biocremation and flame cremations offered by his company are the same, he explains.
‘The machine itself is a bit more expensive than a flame crematory, but the actual cost of running the equipment is very comparable,’ he tells DailyMail.com. ‘We actually provide both flame cremation and green cremation, biocremation, at the same price … I think a part of it for us was, we were one of the first in the country or the world to put it in, we didn’t have a lot of background on how it was going to be perceived, we said, “Okay, let’s put the price the same and take that factor out of it and we’ll see.”’
Both UCLA and the Bradshaw Group use machine made by Resomation Ltd, a company formed ten years ago by Glaswegian Sandy Sullivan. He previously worked for WR², which was the brainchild of two professors and started out manufacturing machines for the disposal of animals. The company sold a machine in 1995 meant for the disposal of multiple human cadavers to Shands Hospital at the University of Florida in Gainesville and, three years later, then-CEO and president Joe Wilson built a machine designed for a single human body – but it was never sold.
Dean Fisher, who was working at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota at the time, had been given a tour of the Florida machine and decided he wanted one for use at the donated body program at Mayo. The facility had been using local crematories, but they ‘kind of got in cahoots and started raising their prices,’ he says.
‘We just felt it would be best practice for us if we kept everything in-house, where we controlled from the time somebody donated their body all the way through the final disposition of giving the ashes back to the families,’ he says.
‘The other reason is, if you think about it, Mayo and UCLA are large campuses. Mayo’s on a large medical complex that consists of over 30 buildings; UCLA probably has 60 buildings. To put a crematory in the middle of that and to blow smoke all over campus would draw some attention –where with this process, it’s so clean and it can go straight into the drain when we’re finished and be recycled.’
He ordered a machine to spec from WR² and it was delivered – but the company went out of business 17 days later and Dean couldn’t get it to work.
Sandy Sullivan contacted him to say that he could fix the problem, and he did. But his company is not the only one offering biocremation machines for humans, and there’s a bit of a war going on between Sullivan and his main competitor, Bio-Response Solutions – started by his former colleague, Joe Wilson. Bio-Response Solutions offers cheaper machines but the process to cremate a body can take up to 16 hours, rather than four. Wilson and Sullivan got into an argument at an alkaline hydrolysis symposium in February, according to Wired, publicly shouting at one another.
The Bio-Response Solutions website offers two options for alkaline hydrolysis; the ‘human low temperature system’ operates at a temperature between 199 and 208 degrees Fahrenheit, working for between 12 and 16 hours; the ‘human high temperature system’ operates at a temperature between 199 and 302 degrees Fahrenheit and, according the company, can have ‘as little as 6 hour turnaround.’
Regardless of who is making the machines, however, there is definitely growing interest in the process – and Mr Fisher insists that ‘this will be the future of final disposition.’
Mr Fisher says that he, his children and his parents all want this form of disposition for themselves; he believes alkaline hydrolysis will form about 5 percent of disposition in his lifetime but will grow from there
Proponents of biocremation explain how it is much more environmentally friendly than alternative types of disposition; metal and other substances seep into the ground or atmosphere through burial and flame cremation
Mr Fisher praises the elimination of mercury emissions; the average person, he says, has three grams of mercury in their mouth placed by dentists – and the mercury would be released into the atmosphere through regular flame cremation, while it is preserved through his machine and disposed of safely
‘This is definitely my choice,’ he says. ‘Someday I want to donate my body to science, and I want to go in this machine. For other people, they don’t want any part of it. They might want to be buried, they might want to have flame, but it should be a choice – and it’s the most environmentally friendly choice that there is out there.
‘So I honestly think that there will be a market for this during my lifetime – probably 5 percent or less, but as our younger generation goes … my kids love it. My mom and dad are going to go this way; they’re in their 80s. They’ve seen it, they understand; thank God we have it in Minnesota so they can use it.
‘Once people know about it and it’s catching on, they will definitely use it – but it needs to be a choice everywhere. And that’s all we’re asking, is it to be a choice.’
Resistance to change often comes hand-in-hand with the mortuary industry, both he and Mr Bradshaw agree.
‘I had no idea when I first started in funeral service that this would ever exist someday, but I’m glad it does,’ Mr Fisher says. ‘It’s hard when people haven’t changed for ten years, and the majority of these businesses are family-ran businesses – you know, grandpa did it that way, Dad did it that way, I’m going to do it that way and my son’s going to do it that way. That’s how we do things. It’s hard to change. So we’re trying to change an industry and we’re trying to change things little by little and make things better.
‘It’s no different than when we used to drive around in cars without seat belts or we used leaded gas versus unleaded gas and now we use electric cars – so you know, people get into their habits and it’s hard to make them change … and from a funeral service standpoint, change is probably harder than anything else, because nobody wants to talk about death and nobody wants to even think about it, in most cases.’
Both he and Mr Bradshaw regularly get calls from fellow members of the industry interested in biocremation; UCLA happily gives tours.
‘We’re kind of at the point where there’s this tipping point where we’re starting to see an increase in interest,’ Mr Bradshaw says. ‘I think you have people that are believing that it’s the next big thing that’s coming up.
‘I think up until very recently there’s been a lot of unknowns with it,’ he says of biocremation. ‘What you start to see is a little bit of the snowball effect. Right now people are starting to realize, okay, it does work, it’s well received.’