Eco-burial turns corpse to compost

LYR, Sweden — An environmentally friendly method of burying the dead is offering tough competition to traditional funerals — transforming corpses into organic compost and giving people the chance to come back as flowers.

Traditional burials and cremations hurt the environment by polluting air and water and upsetting the ecology of the sea. This led Swedish biologist Susanne Wiigh to come up with an alternative.

“Nature’s original plan was for dead bodies to fall on the earth, be torn apart by animals and become soil,” Mrs. Wiigh said in Lyr, a small, romantic island off Sweden’s southwestern coast, where she lives with her family and runs her company, Promessa AB.

Mrs. Wiigh, who also manages the island’s only shop well-stocked with organic food next to an impressive greenhouse, concedes that “we clearly can’t go back to that,” but said her method is as close to nature as modern ethics allow.

The method consists of taking the corpse’s temperature to minus 321 Fahrenheit in a liquid-nitrogen bath and breaking the brittle body down into a rough powder through mechanical vibration.

The remains are then dehydrated and cleared of any metal, reducing a body weighing 165 pounds in life to 55 pounds of pink-beige powder, plus the remains of the coffin.

The whole process occurs in a facility resembling a crematorium and takes about two hours. A corpse buried in a coffin takes several years to decompose completely.

Mrs. Wiigh says compost always has been her passion.

“For me, it’s really romantic. It smells good. It feels like gold,” she said.

And like all compost, human remains should be used to feed plants and shrubs, planted by a dead person’s family. She thinks the powder would be incorporated completely into the plant within a few years.

“The plant becomes the perfect way to remember the person. When a father dies, we can say, ‘The same molecules that made up Daddy also built this plant,’” said Mrs. Wiigh, whose late cat Tussan currently nourishes a rhododendron bush in her front garden.

Mrs. Wiigh, a soft-spoken woman with an easy smile who dedicates 60 hours a week to Promessa, also would like to turn into a rhododendron — of the white variety.

What might look like no more than an ecologist’s dream vision might have serious business potential, breathing new life into an innovation-shy industry.

Industrial-gas company AGA Gas, part of Germany’s Linde group, has invested in the idea, taking a controlling stake of 53 percent in Promessa, alongside Mrs. Wiigh’s 42 percent and 5 percent held by the Church of Sweden.

“The commercial potential could be quite large,” said AGA spokesman Olof Kaellgren, whose company contributes expertise of the nitrogen-cooling process.

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