People are said to be born from earth and return to earth. Humanity has buried bodies in the ground or burned them to return to earth. In the future, more people are expected to return to water instead of earth. Scotland became the first in the United Kingdom to allow "water cremation," which dissolves a body and releases the purified water back to nature. Related regulations that the Scottish devolved government submitted to Parliament on Dec. 3 last year took effect on the 2nd (local time).
Water cremation may be a more natural method than existing funeral practices. Because 55% to 65% of the human body is water, returning it to water is natural. On this day, Minister Jenni Minto of Scotland's health department said, "This is the biggest change since the Cremation Act of 1902 was enacted," adding, "Water cremation meets public support for a new eco-friendly alternative to cremation or burial."
◇ Hydrolysis with a non-boiling alkaline solution
Water cremation, also called liquid cremation (resomation), is a funeral technology using alkaline hydrolysis. It is like cremation in that the bones ultimately become powder, but differs in that the body is broken down by water instead of heat. Water cremation proceeds as follows. First, the body is wrapped in a shroud made of biodegradable materials such as silk or wool, then placed in a high-pressure steel tank. The tank is filled with a dissolving liquid composed of 95% water and 5% alkaline chemicals such as potassium hydroxide.
Over three to four hours at 150 to 160 C, the body dissolves and the natural decomposition process that would take decades in a coffin is replicated. Because the tank is under high pressure, the liquid does not boil. When decomposition is finished, only liquid and softened bones remain. The liquid is purified and discharged into the sewer, and the remaining bones are made into powder and placed in an urn like cremation or scattered in nature.
Water cremation is drawing attention as an eco-friendly funeral method. Traditional cremation emits 320 kg of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, but the alkaline hydrolysis method is said to produce one-seventh as much carbon dioxide. Because of these advantages, more countries are legalizing it. In the United States, 28 states allow it, and it is also permitted in Canada, Ireland and South Africa. The funeral of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who resisted apartheid in South Africa, was also conducted using this method.
The Scottish government expects water cremation to be available from the summer. To conduct water cremation, hydrolysis equipment must be installed, and approval from Scottish Water, the water resources corporation, is also required for water treatment. Kindly Earth holds exclusive rights to water cremation equipment in the United Kingdom. Helen Chandler, the company's chief executive, said, "Of course not everyone will choose hydrolysis, but the important thing is to give bereaved families more options."
◇ Diamond cremation and space cremation
There have been other funeral technologies besides burial and cremation before. A representative example is burning the body but leaving it as a diamond, a gemstone, instead of earth. "Diamond burial," which makes diamonds from cremated remains, began in 2004 at a Swiss company called Algordanza. Algordanza means "memory" in a Swiss language.
Diamond, like coal or graphite used for pencil lead, is a substance made of carbon. In the human body, excluding the oxygen and hydrogen that make up water, carbon is the most abundant. The difference lies in the crystal structure. In coal, carbon atoms are in a highly disordered state, and in graphite, carbon atoms connected in hexagons are stacked in layers. In contrast, diamond has a structure in which tetrahedra formed by four carbon atoms are repeated endlessly in all directions.
Algordanza compresses cremated remains under high temperature and pressure—1,500 degrees and 1,600 tons—to create synthetic diamonds with a tetrahedral crystal structure. Because of the boron (B) component typically present in cremated remains, the rough diamond generally has a subtle blue hue. The production period averages four to five months, and the price for a 0.3-carat diamond, based on rough stone, is about 4.6 million won.
There is also space burial, which sends cremated remains into space. In a sense, a person dies and becomes a star in the sky. In 1997, Celestis, a U.S. space company, started it for the first time. The remains of 24 people, including Gene Roddenberry, writer of the science-fiction Star Trek series, went into Earth orbit on Apr. 21 of that year aboard Pegasus, an air-launched rocket by Orbital Sciences.
The capsules containing the cremated remains orbited Earth and burned up when they reentered Earth's atmosphere on May 20, 2002. More recently, on Aug. 16, 2024, the remains of two former astronauts with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) went to space aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.
There is also someone who made the moon a grave. The U.S. lunar probe Lunar Prospector, launched on Jan. 16, 1998, completed its 19-month mission and impacted near the lunar south pole on July 31, 1999. Inside was a capsule containing the remains of U.S. geologist Eugene Shoemaker (1928–1997).
Shoemaker left many achievements in the study of Earth's impact craters. With his wife, Carolyn, and Canadian amateur astronomer David Levy, he also discovered the comet Shoemaker–Levy 9. In particular, he took part in the United States' crewed lunar exploration program in the 1960s, but developed an illness and was dropped as an astronaut candidate along the way. In a sense, he achieved in death his dream of becoming the first geologist to go to the moon.
References
Scottish Government (2025), https://www.gov.scot/news/sustainable-alternative-to-cremation/
Science (1998), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.279.5349.329a