Unusual Body Disposals

Many unorthodox burial practices are not actually offered in Canada because the companies that offer them are foreign companies, and similar enterprises have not yet been established here. However, if you are welling to shell out some cash to pay not only for these methods of disposal but also for the cost of transportation to wherever they're done, then you too can have your dead body disposed of in one of these unusual ways!

Welcome to the House of...Wax?...Nope! House of Liquefied Human Remains: Liquefaction

Video on how liquefaction is performed

Resomation Ltd., a Glasgow-based company, has installed a unit in a funeral home in St. Petersburg, Florida that has the capacity to turn a human body into a slimy liquid -- a process already in use for medical cadavers and livestock. This innovation is part of the green movement -- the company claims that it emits about one third of the greenhouse gases and consumes substantially less energy than cremation does (future of body disposal in Britain?). The body is liquefied by being placed in heated alkaline water that causes dissolution of the  corpse. The bones remain intact and, after the flesh has been dissolved, are removed from the liquid and pulverized in the same way bones are crushed following cremation. This process has been legalized in seven American states and is awaiting legalization in Britain where its patent is held (it's awaiting patents in other countries). A rival company in Australia called Aquamation Industries has already employing this method, and 19 bodies in Ohio were liquefied before it was ruled that this was illegal within the state. (information courtesy of http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14114555)

This Body Doesn't Bounce
Another strange, greener-than-burial-or-cremation method of body disposal involves freezing the body with liquid nitrogen, vibrating the frozen body so it fragments, drying these fragments, and removing metals by passing through a filter before being placed in a biodegradable coffin for shallow burial -- Swedish biologist Susanne Wiigh-Masak, the innovator who has been proposing this for ten years, calls this Promession. The point of this kind of disposal is to be environmentally friendly as the shallow burial is equivalent to using the body as compost. The method has only been tested on pigs, but it is ready for human testing, particularly since the Swedish government is planning on making it easier by allowing people to use a burial tax for promession. (information once again courtesy of http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14114555)

I'll Pass on the Yield of These Three Farms...
This will be the last method I discuss, and is my personal favourite -- body farms. No body farms exist in Canada, but there are currently five (one is not yet operational) in the United States, the original being the one at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville (begun in 1981 by Dr. Bill Bass, an anthropologist) and largest being at the Texas State University in Freeman Ranch, measuring 7 acres. The purpose of body farms is to gain a better understanding of decomposition in order to extract information -- for instance, time and cause of death -- from human remains. You can donate your body to these facilities where your decomposition would be monitored, skeleton kept for studying, etc. This is how I would actually like my body to be disposed of. Here is a link to Josh and Chuck of the podcast Stuff You Should Know discussing body farms http://science.discovery.com/videos/stuff-you-should-know-body-farms.html. For more information, I would highly recommend checking out the actual podcast episode. Not only is it highly informative and interesting, Josh and Chuck are hilarious!