F.A.Q. - Frequently Asked Questions
- What is Water Resolution?
- Is Water Resolution a genuine alternative to cremation?
- Has the technology been used and proven elsewhere?
- What do the bone shadows actually look like?
- How is the body transported to the Water Resolution Unit?
Water Resolution is the application of Alkaline Hydrolysis to human cadavers to produce a pure ash bone shadow. It is an accelerated version of the natural process of hydrolysis driven decomposition after burial.
The individual body is essentially placed into a horizontal pressure vessel and then a fully automated process of pressure, high temperature, and alkalinity accelerates the natural process of tissue hydrolysis back into the building blocks of life. The product is sent back to the environment to be recycled.
What is Alkaline Hydrolysis?
Alkaline Hydrolysis is a natural process. Bodies that are buried in the earth are degraded by alkaline hydrolysis, expedited by the soil bacteria. This is a very slow process.
Food in the intestine is digested into usable nutrients by alkaline hydrolysis, expedited by enzymes that operate at a pH 7-8 at body temperature. This is a moderately fast process for relatively small amounts of tissue.
The WR² Alkaline Hydrolysis Process uses strong alkali (pH 14) to solubilize and hydrolyze tissue, expedited by heat at 150˚C in a pressurized vessel. This process generates a solution of amino acids, peptides, sugars, and soap (salts of fatty acids) that that is suitable for release to drain, land applied as fertilizer, or recycled in many ways. Also produced are pure white bone shadows (ash), which may be easily powdered and given to the relatives as in cremation. The powder is 100% specific to that corpse.
- Ashes may be returned as in cremation, but unlike cremation in that the ashes produced in the Water Resolution process are 100% separated from other bodies.
- The Water Resolution process is 3-5 times less expensive than cremation.
- The Water Resolution process does not create air pollution such as mercury from amalgam, with no requirement to burn the casket which adds to greenhouse gases.
- The process offers reusable better quality caskets at a lower cost.
- Can be easily installed into an existing crematorium.
- The corpse through Water Resolution is resolved to its individual component life building blocks from which it came. Essentially you see all the benefits of cremation without polluting the environment, as well as the back to nature benefits of shallow burial.
The alkaline hydrolysis process has successfully been used worldwide for more than twelve years in laboratory and research applications. Incineration is now a thing of the past in tissue research, and alkaline hydrolysis is the new standard.
The use of alkaline hydrolysis on human bodies is limited to a couple medical schools in the U.S. where a few thousand corpses have already been successfully and sympathetically put through the Water Reduction process.
The bone shadows left after the Water Reduction process are completely sterile white bones left mostly intact. These bone shadows are brittle enough to be powdered to ash by your bare hands.
There are a couple alternative methods to accomplish this. The first would be a specially designed traditional looking wooden casket that is applied as the outer visible container. The actual sealed “coffin” inside the casket would be of a special starch based natural and environmentally friendly material that would be safely dissolved in the process. The second alternative would simplify the process by sacrificing some aesthetic appeal, utilizing only a dissolvable and sealable rigid casket to be used throughout the entire process.