cremation

Posted by Charles

An undated document issued by the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management (ICCM) makes clear its policy on the practice of ‘holding over’ – the retention of bodies for up to 72 hours in order to optimise cremators:

5.  Operation of Cremation Equipment

At present cremator operating time in relation to usage of fossil fuel, reduction of harmful emissions and efficiency is overlooked.

It is current practice to pre-heat cremators at the start of each day and cool them down after the last cremation of the day and repeat this process throughout the week. Apart from the excessive use of fossil fuel for daily pre-heating, the risk of emissions of pollutants from the first cremations of each day is increased.

Holding cremations over for a limited period will allow continuity of use with resultant reductions in fuel consumption. Industry codes of practice have attempted to address this situation with the Federation of British Cremation Authorities code stating that the cremation should take place within 24 hours of the funeral service whilst the Institute of Cemetery & Crematorium Management’s Guiding Principles for the Charter for the Bereaved states 72 hours. Despite these codes of practice being in existence very few crematoria hold cremations over for any period. This lack of action by authorities is perpetuating the impact on the environment. [Source]

You’ve got to hand it to the ICCM, it got away with pushing the holding over time from 24hrs to 72hrs with barely a squeak of outrage from the media. Its acceptability to families is now proven – they have to give permission. But we hear of funeral directors so opposed to it that they talk their families out of it.

Once in a while, inevitably, we hear howls of outrage. Here’s a recent howl from Salisbury:

PLANS to refrigerate dead bodies for up to 48 hours before cremating them were approved on Monday despite being branded “morally unacceptable”.

Five councillors on Salisbury City Council’s services committee were outraged by proposals for a cold storage facility to be installed as part of the £2.34million refurbishment of Salisbury’s crematorium. 

Councillors Jo Broom and Brian Dalton said it would be insensitive to bereaved families and cllr Bobbie Chettleburgh said nobody wants to think that their mother is being kept in the freezer “next to the frozen peas”.

This sort of inflammatory imbecility from indigenous community leaders is a common feature of debates about death and funerals. It goes to show just how profoundly ignorant people generally are about such things, especially those who should know better.

There was some good sense uttered at the meeting:

Cllr Frank Pennycook said: “I think we need to remember that bodies are kept in storage after death already – in the hospital morgue and at the undertakers. If I died and my body was the only one at the crematorium that day I’d want them to store it until they had more.”

And:

City clerk Reg Williams said: “By far the most expensive part of the crematorium is firing up the cremators. If we only have one or two a day, that’s an extremely expensive and poor use of them.

[Source]

The ICCM’s impact-on-the-environment argument is strong. But come on, chaps, 72-hour holding over is a sticking plaster solution to a much more serious problem. Crematoria as they exist in this country will forever be grossly inefficient burners of the dead. If the logic of 72 hours holds, then so does the logic of uncoupling the incinerators and having one incineration facility for several crematoria. If people aren’t bothered by the wait, they are hardy likely to be bothered by a short journey by road.

If the environmental argument is strong – and it is – then it should be pursued to its logical conclusion. 

Germany is a world leader in crematorium technology, but its crematoria are finding it hard to cope with some of its XXL citizens: 

The crematorium employee in the western German town of Hamelin took a last look at the coffin before pushing it inside the furnace. This was the third coffin he had processed on the morning of January 13, and the body itself weighed over 200 kilograms (440 pounds). Of that, only two kilograms of ashes were supposed to remain after cremation. But, 15 minutes later, flames shot out of the crematorium’s 10-meter-high (33-foot-high) stainless-steel chimney, and parts of it began to melt. 

Unable to bring the fire under control, the employee called the fire department. Firemen determined that the smoking chimney was glowing at 600 degrees Celsius (1,100 degrees Fahrenheit). They cooled it from the side and used an infrared camera to track the spread of heat through the building. It took four hours to reduce the body in the furnace to ash.

It’s the high fat content that does it. 

Firefighters responding to a fire at a crematorium in Hamburg in January 2008 even had to don protective breathing masks. The cremation of the body of an overweight man had led to a deflagration. The bypass flaps jammed and exhaust was unable to escape through the chimney. As a result, brownish smoke billowed through the building and the firefighters’ instruments showed high levels of toxic carbon monoxide.

To avoid spikes in pollution levels, a study by the Bavarian Environment Agency recommends placing coffins of particularly heavy corpses into the furnace “with the lid slightly open”.

Because there are so many crematoria in Germany, there is much competition between them. This has brought the cost of cremation down to £250. 

Is anyone aware of similar fat-fire problems in UK crematoria? (We  know all about the cost problems.) 

Info source here.

“You can’t just put the fire on the pyre and go off. The shutters should be opened and additional firewood has to be placed at least thrice. While burning bodies of people who had taken a lot of medications, like cancer patients, certain chemicals spurt out of the body. This can be hazardous if it falls on you.”

Selina Jacob, manager of Thrikkakara crematorium, Kerala, India — here

The infantile superficiality of the media’s treatment of issues around death and funerals is something we’ve deplored frequently on this blog — and today’s news is that things haven’t got any better.

Instead of giving serious consideration to what a crematorium might do with the heat it is compelled to capture from its waste gases, a necessary precondition for mercury scrubbing, the Daily Mail prefers to target its readers’ susceptibility to righteous indignation. So we get this: 

A council’s cost-saving plans to heat a chapel where mourners go to grieve with energy from the burning of dead bodies has outraged residents. 

‘I think it’s outrageous. Relatives will be sitting in the chapel remembering their loved ones and knowing their bodies are being used to cut energy bills,’ said James Sanderson, 43. ‘I would not like to be sitting there thinking my dead gran was heating up the room. It’s sick and an insult to our loved ones.’

What the clever journalist, who surely knows better, has hidden from the readers and the combustible Mr Sanderson, who seems to like going off on one if it means getting in the paper, is that human corpses make very poor fuel. This may be down to them being 72 per cent water. Try and heat your living room by chucking another nan on the fire and you’ll find that out soon enough.

Rentagob is never far from a hack’s mic or notebook at a time like this. In the same article Tory twat councillor Tom Wootton said:

‘The Conservative group is quite shocked by this proposal and we want more information and figures as to how cost-effective this would be.

‘The Liberals have insisted they will not burn rubbish to make energy but here they are proposing to use the heat from burning dead people, which I think is a little strange.”

Here in Redditch this debate has been had and put to bed. A union official raged and an undertaker spluttered, but the good ordinary people of this lovely old moss-covered market town simply thought about it quietly then gave their thumbs up to heating the swimming pool with a little help from the crem. 

For they understand that the heat given off by a burning body is negligible, and that their swimming pool will in fact be heated by the heat used to burn bodies. 

The British, it seems, are a reassuringly pragmatic people, an impression reinforced by the fact that, when we last looked, no one had bothered to comment on the Mail’s inflammatory nonsense.

Read the whole article, if you can be bothered, here.

We like this account of the dangers posed by mercury emissions from crematoria:

Mercury is an odd element. It is a metal, yet liquid at ambient temperature and it is very volatile, easily becoming a gas. Keep in mind mercury is an element, therefore cannot be destroyed.

When mercury is emitted from the stack of an incinerator, it exists in its gaseous state while dropping to the surrounding terrain. When atmospheric mercury falls to Earth, it does so as a dry deposition. Bacteria in soils and water then convert this mercury into the very toxic and lethal methylmercury, and it is this form of mercury that is taken up by tiny aquatic plants and organisms. Fish, for instance, that eat these plants and organisms build up methylmercury in their tissue. As bigger fish eat the smaller fish, the methylmercury is concentrated farther up the food chain. This process is referred to as ” bio-accumulation.” This accumulation of methylmercury can reach a level millions of times higher than the water it came from.

Methylmercury is freely transported across the human blood brain barrier, as well as across the placenta, where it is absorbed by the developing fetus. Children with this history show a loss of IQ points, decreased performance of language skills and memory function, as well as attention deficits. In adults there can be cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and autoimmune effects.

Source