Transcript
Speaker: Hi guys and welcome to the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host Jennifer Muldowney aka the Glam Reaper herself.
Speaker: Today on the show we have a subject that is near and dear to my heart which is the environment and we are talking about one of the latest forms of body disposition.
Speaker: We are talking to Ed about fireless cremation.
Speaker: Tell me a little bit about you, Ed.
Speaker: Lovely to have you here.
Speaker: Welcome, welcome.
Speaker: And tell us, why are you here?
Speaker: Jennifer, I'm in the death care business.
Speaker: Kind of landed here.
Speaker: It's my death calling at this point.
Speaker: Lovely.
Speaker: My birthday's this week.
Speaker: I'll be 61.
Speaker: Happy birthday in advance.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: So I started starting businesses back.
Speaker: when I was in high school, but I started a company in college that went public.
Speaker: So I've been involved in reducing emissions through the air, uh, knocks and socks from major power plants.
Speaker: That company still traded on NASDAQ, uh, fuel tech and clean diesel technology.
Speaker: Um, I also built the largest green building here in Colorado.
Speaker: So it's a double lead platinum.
Speaker: I've been involved in reducing energy use and trying to clean up the environment, making people healthy for decades.
Speaker: And I read about Resumation 10 years ago and tried to get the rights from Sandy Sullivan in the UK.
Speaker: And I was negotiating with him, but he gave the rights, as we all know, to Matthews Industries for the U.S. So he gave it to a company that's got 5,000 crematories around the world.
Speaker: And they had a very expensive system and I called them and wanted to work with them, but they told me to pound sand.
Speaker: Uh, so I did a patent search.
Speaker: So I've taken Pat and I went and found someone who had worked at WR square, which ironically is also where Sandy Sullivan work.
Speaker: So alkaline hydrolysis has his basis with these two professors in upstate New York.
Speaker: So that's kind of where it all originated.
Speaker: Uh, they were trying to get rid of some,
Speaker: Waskily wabbits that had been infected with radiation and they used to have to package them up in stainless steel barrels and ship them off to Nevada.
Speaker: And they figured out they could just flush them down the drain if they use alkaline hydrolysis.
Speaker: And that's the origin of where all this came from.
Speaker: Okay, so just to pause you right there, for anybody that doesn't know, resumation, alkaline hydrolysis, water cremation, biochremation, there's a lot of terms that float around to do with this specific thing.
Speaker: And essentially what it is, is disposition of a human body or any body, as you discussed about rabbits.
Speaker: So it's getting rid, disposition of a body using liquid water.
Speaker: We use chemicals, so you use alkali.
Speaker: It's a pH of 14.
Speaker: We have our own patent pending on a new chemical process, but we still use alkali, but we use an accelerant.
Speaker: So rather than taking 18 hours at low temperature, we only take about two hours.
Speaker: And then we also have a process where we bring the pH down from typically 10.2 is where they end up with resumation.
Speaker: down the neutral, which is seven.
Speaker: So you're actually useful for the earth.
Speaker: So we actually do, you know, fireless burials.
Speaker: We give back a hundred percent of the body, not just the bones.
Speaker: So you also get all the essence of the person too.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So again, just for anybody out there, uh, when regular cremation is what people mostly know about by the time this goes to air, maybe more people will know about resumation and alkaline hydrolysis and all the other
Speaker: Right now it's burial or cremation.
Speaker: Like when you go into a funeral home, it's typically burial or cremation.
Speaker: There are states that have opened up to water cremation or resumation or the other, but effectively it's kind of one of two options at the moment, right?
Speaker: Cremation, typically what you get back is just
Speaker: ground down bone.
Speaker: Now, there are people out there who have questions about whether the casket gets burned, whether it's resold, whether when they get it back, is it their loved one with a casket?
Speaker: We've kind of jumped a massive leap ahead as well, by the way.
Speaker: Just as effectively by being rebuffed by sort of Matthews and Sandy, effectively, you've just said, OK, stick a finger up, I'll go and do my own thing.
Speaker: And so you've come up with your own, what you consider better
Speaker: to resumation and alkaline hydrolysis and this kind of thing.
Speaker: So what is your, when you say you're better for the earth, talk to us about the difference between that and cremation.
Speaker: Let's forget about resumation for uno momento, just because I know a lot of people are still not familiar with it and it's not even legal in a whole lot of states.
Speaker: So talk about it in terms of what people know now.
Speaker: So, because you call it fireless cremation.
Speaker: So that's what people know right now is fired cremation.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So when you burn a body, you use petrochemicals.
Speaker: So typically it takes about 3 million BTUs, which is equivalent energy of 26 gallons of gasoline, to burn a body.
Speaker: So the body is a carbon-based life form.
Speaker: And to burn it, all the water and everything has to be evaporated.
Speaker: And it takes hours to reduce a body and fuel out of a smokestack about 50% of someone's bones.
Speaker: And these small particulates go out the smokestack, which is
Speaker: the sixth leading cause of death around the world.
Speaker: So we've got a process where we're doing a final disposition of the dead and releasing toxins, mercury furon.
Speaker: So you talked about, do they burn the casket?
Speaker: They don't like burning metal caskets, but I'll tell you when the bodies come in, they've got all kinds of mercury in their teeth, typically from amalgams.
Speaker: A lot of times there'll be plastic in with the body, you know, whether they have polyester clothes on, uh,
Speaker: And it's just a mess what comes out the smokestack.
Speaker: It's actually 50 times the safe limit of mercury comes out of an average smokestack.
Speaker: And no one does anything about it because the EPA doesn't consider humans waste.
Speaker: So they actually have these small afterburners on the top of crematories that break the particles that are coming out.
Speaker: So you don't see the flesh coming out and the bones coming out.
Speaker: It's really small.
Speaker: They're PM 2.5, which means they get into your body.
Speaker: They can go through your lungs and get into your blood and go into your brain.
Speaker: And that's where, you know, this neurotoxin, you know, of things like mercury is very harmful.
Speaker: And what people don't know is when you get back the bones, you talked about how they're, they rank them out.
Speaker: They're on fire.
Speaker: It takes about two hours for them to cool.
Speaker: Then they're going to remove all the implants that they can find metal and screws because they want to ruin what they call kind of a premulator, something that actually grinds up bones.
Speaker: So typically when they rake them out, you can't get, you get by law, you have to just get the preponderance of bones out.
Speaker: And that oven is 1600 to 1900 degrees.
Speaker: And typically if you're a funeral home, you've got another body you want to put in there, or if you're a trade work crematory.
Speaker: And they only rebrick these things every 2000 bodies.
Speaker: So if you think about it, when you get your earned back, it's full of commingled cremates.
Speaker: So there's other people's bones in there with whoever else was cremated before you.
Speaker: So that's just the way it works.
Speaker: So it's just not a very good process for the earth.
Speaker: And it releases, I mean, there's different studies.
Speaker: I think the best I've seen is 540 pounds of carbon dioxide per cremation.
Speaker: Whereas we use electric heat.
Speaker: and we use about 40 kilowatts, which is equivalent of about 36 pounds of CO2 admitted to heat our vessel.
Speaker: So we use way less than even about 5% of what crematories do to burn a body.
Speaker: In terms of energy you're saving on the input, what about the output?
Speaker: Does your unit have any output?
Speaker: Does it have any chimney stack?
Speaker: What's the MO on that?
Speaker: Does it have any output, anything at all?
Speaker: There's water vapors, so we do
Speaker: heat the vessel to about 190 degrees.
Speaker: There is some low VOCs that come out, volatile organic compounds, and it's minimal.
Speaker: We don't burn any of the clothing and we don't even burn a viscera bag.
Speaker: We actually take the viscera bag out.
Speaker: So that's what, when they use an autopsy, you end up with a big plastic bag in your gut full of your viscerals.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: Typically that's burned.
Speaker: And so anytime you burn plastic, as you know, you get ferrons and dioxins going up into the air, which means everybody in that radius of that's, uh, Prematory is breathing in that that was just burned.
Speaker: I mean, it's, it's pretty bad.
Speaker: So, and then the other differences in our vessel, as opposed to, let's say, resume, Asians or viral response, all of those, when you're, when you're done with offline hydrolysis, typically anywhere from a third
Speaker: We've had three times as much sandy bones, tiny bones that are the size of salt that would typically just go down the drain.
Speaker: So we're giving back more of the person, 100% of their bone material back to the family.
Speaker: So typically people need two urns.
Speaker: I mean, it's a massive amount of bones you get back and it just surprises people and they're white and they're beautiful and they don't contain any, they're not oily and, you know, charred.
Speaker: like they would be.
Speaker: So how does that work?
Speaker: How do you give people twice as much back versus the crematorium?
Speaker: Is that because half of them have gone up in smoke?
Speaker: Is that?
Speaker: The bones are just on fire.
Speaker: I mean, even when they rake them out, they're in a stainless steel container.
Speaker: And like I said, it takes about two hours for them to stop burning once they even rake them out.
Speaker: But during that process, you've got to
Speaker: You want sterile bones.
Speaker: And so they get into the marrow and the inside of the bones.
Speaker: You pretty much have to cook them till they're cracked and they're broken apart.
Speaker: Think about leaving a chicken thigh on the, or chicken leg on this grill until there's nothing left.
Speaker: You know, it just kind of breaks apart and it's all, there's no flesh or anything.
Speaker: That's what happens in a crematory.
Speaker: It's just something's left inside an oven until there's nothing left really.
Speaker: And a lot of the bones go up in the air.
Speaker: We are talking very basic here and obviously, you know, this will be a difficult episode for anybody who has lost somebody and maybe gotten them cremated and everything like that.
Speaker: There's no funeral director tells, they don't typically tell you what happened.
Speaker: There's two sides to that.
Speaker: There's one where should we be completely transparent in all and in everything?
Speaker: Honestly, as somebody who deals with grieving people on a daily basis, there are people who are prepared for that, people who want that transparency and there are people that absolutely do not.
Speaker: It's a very difficult conversation to broach with people.
Speaker: You know, do you know what really happens inside a cremulator?
Speaker: There is a sort of naivete attached, I think, to Joe Public in terms of what happens with burial and cremation.
Speaker: You know, even people that are talking about eco burials and things like that.
Speaker: It is there's a lot that people don't know.
Speaker: And the carcinogenic drugs that we pump into our bodies towards the end of our lives are
Speaker: all that has to go up somewhere, whether it's back into the ground if you've gone for burial or whether it's up as chimney smoke, chimney stack.
Speaker: So you call yourself fireless cremation and yet you've referred to burning quite a lot in your description of what happens.
Speaker: So talk to me a bit about that.
Speaker: It's a dissolution as opposed to a burning.
Speaker: So fireless, we're not using petrochemicals, we're using
Speaker: chemicals which actually return nutrients to the earth.
Speaker: So we talked about already how you get twice as much bone matter back, but you also get all the essence.
Speaker: So when you look at a person, they're not just a skeleton inside, which is maybe eight to 12% of their total body mass.
Speaker: Uh, but there's all the rest of them.
Speaker: And what we do is, you know, for about every a hundred pounds, we only use 12 gallons of water where someone like Resumation or by response, their processes typically take about 300 gallons.
Speaker: So one of the reasons people don't really like other alkaline hydrolysis is everything goes down the sewer right at the end.
Speaker: Nobody wants to flush granny down the toilet.
Speaker: That's not to say I'm against reservation, but that's the... Well, I mean, I think it's better than petrochemical cremation, but it'd be really nice if you could take granny, you know, not have to breathe her because someone burned her and not have to put her down the sewer, which people don't see as dignified.
Speaker: So I sold the very first system of a funeral director 10 years ago.
Speaker: I had a company called Cycle of Life, but I've got a new process now.
Speaker: What happens is all that material in your body, all this beautiful, rich, nutrient, organic material is returned to the earth.
Speaker: So in our process, nothing goes down the sewer.
Speaker: In fact, most people take 25 gallons of the essence, twice as much bones back and hurry it.
Speaker: They take it up to the mountains, they put it in their backyard,
Speaker: And that way they don't need a casket and they don't need a cemetery to do burials.
Speaker: So we actually provide people a burial and if they don't want that essence, which is really a plant biostimulant, it's a fertilizer.
Speaker: Because the chemicals we use actually add nutrients in your body.
Speaker: We make you better off dead than you are alive for the earth, right?
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: I mean, that's very impressive.
Speaker: When you keep referring to essence, is that liquid form?
Speaker: Is that powder form?
Speaker: It's liquid.
Speaker: Okay, so when somebody gets their loved one back, if I get granny back, for example, I'm going to get an urn of her ash and, if you like, an urn of her liquid.
Speaker: Now, you'll get what we call plaskets.
Speaker: So they're caskets.
Speaker: So they're five-gallon plastic jugs.
Speaker: They're clear.
Speaker: Currently, they're white.
Speaker: And they have a handle.
Speaker: So typically, a 150-pound person, you'd get about 25 gallons of her essence back.
Speaker: So it'd be a liquid form.
Speaker: You can pour it right on the ground.
Speaker: You can dig a hole and pour it in and then put the dirt back on.
Speaker: But the idea is it actually adds nutrients to the top layer of the soil.
Speaker: Where in a burrow, someone's four feet under, even a green burrow, you got to bury them deep enough that the scavengers won't come dig them out.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: So you got to be at least four feet under the ground.
Speaker: So with ours, you want to add nutrients to the top soil so you help the living.
Speaker: So you make plants and trees and everything more vital.
Speaker: If I take granny's essence and her remains and I get a pot and I put a rose bush seed into the pot, does granny absorb everything and turn into a rose bush or does she need other soil?
Speaker: Because that's the million dollar question on social media.
Speaker: Can I become a tree or can I become a rose bush?
Speaker: So, I mean, you do get absorbed.
Speaker: Your nutrients do get absorbed by whatever...
Speaker: slowly you've been putting into and whatever is growing on that your essence goes into it.
Speaker: So yes, you know, technically you become part of your essence becomes part of a tree, you know, is it you?
Speaker: There's no DNA left.
Speaker: So I mean, what really defines a human?
Speaker: Really, when you're done, you are chemicals, your nutrients for the earth, your, your potassium, your nitrogen, phosphorus, right, your water,
Speaker: And all that is returned to the earth.
Speaker: And that's how we used to be before they started burning people.
Speaker: You know, once there were enough people on the planet that someone died and you could just not avoid them for a while, you had to put them somewhere, right?
Speaker: They start to stink.
Speaker: They bring in scavengers.
Speaker: And so this is a great way to go back to the earth and actually be regenerative to the earth.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And take a plot of land forever, you know, and have all the resources to maintain that land.
Speaker: I mean, I figure if everyone on the earth died today, there'd be another 4% of the inhabitable world would be taken by graves if everyone were buried.
Speaker: You know, got a little 3 by 8 plot.
Speaker: Yeah, no, I mean, burial is definitely not sustainable in its current format, for sure.
Speaker: It's just not.
Speaker: I mean, Asia, for example, is what, 99.9% cremation rate because...
Speaker: There's just no space with him.
Speaker: He just can't go anywhere.
Speaker: The rest of us will soon catch up.
Speaker: It's a fact.
Speaker: Now, tell me this.
Speaker: In terms of legality, you're obviously based in Denver.
Speaker: Are you legal in all the states in the world, countries in the world?
Speaker: Tell us about the legality of this.
Speaker: If we've got a funeral director who's like, this is for me, I want to talk to Ed.
Speaker: What's the crack with that?
Speaker: We fit in with alkaline hydrolysis.
Speaker: I continue to work on laws around the
Speaker: country and around the world.
Speaker: But I mean, wherever alkaline hydrolysis is legal currently, this is legal.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Tell me how does that work for you?
Speaker: Because isn't alkaline hydrolysis very different to what you're doing?
Speaker: When they talk about alkaline hydrolysis, typically the laws are written and I've written some of the laws that are out there.
Speaker: Typically it refers to a chemical process.
Speaker: There's a few states where they actually refer to it as alkaline hydrolysis.
Speaker: And what that means is you just got to use either
Speaker: potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide and water to break the body down.
Speaker: And you do that anyway.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Now there's some people that are out there that are trying to make it high pressure, you know, saying only high pressure destroys the prions.
Speaker: These are DNA strands or protein strands that typically live in the brain.
Speaker: Things like mad cow, chronic wasting disease, avian bear flu, that kind of stuff.
Speaker: Stuff that
Speaker: is really hazardous and kills people.
Speaker: A lot of, they want to make sure that's destroyed.
Speaker: And there's been some recent studies, Ontario just made it legal to use low low temp because there's all these studies now that show that it destroys that.
Speaker: But there's these guys are trying to make high pressure the only way to go and the high pressure machines like, you know, they can cost 240,000 or more, right?
Speaker: Just for the machine.
Speaker: And the problem is they can explode.
Speaker: There's one that exploded recently up in Canada where the lid came off, the door came off and it went through the building and the body went out in the street.
Speaker: It was a bio response system.
Speaker: Oh yeah, the high pressure boiler is what they are.
Speaker: Ours is low temp.
Speaker: So ours is very safe and it destroys everything.
Speaker: So I would never get a high temp system, just one for the money.
Speaker: Two, it takes a lot longer than our process.
Speaker: So our process takes about two hours.
Speaker: Even those systems are taking four to six hours.
Speaker: So, again, just to break it down for everyone.
Speaker: So the high pressure, and this is what I, even as an industry professional, found very, very frustrating and confusing about alkaline hydrolysis, resumation slash water cremation, all the different terms, is there's so many different brand variations of it.
Speaker: And there's so many different variations of it.
Speaker: So when you're talking about high pressure, you're still talking about resumation, but a high pressure version of it.
Speaker: Well, there's Resumation and BioResponse Solutions is the one, their system's the one that exploded up in Canada.
Speaker: Okay, because this is where it's frustrating.
Speaker: And for a non-scientist person, it's frustrating because there's burial or there's cremation.
Speaker: This other option that uses chemicals, there just seems to be so many different variants to it.
Speaker: It's pretty simple.
Speaker: They all came from WR squared, which was waste by waste reduction, right?
Speaker: These two professors in upstate New York.
Speaker: There were medical professors with the radiated rabbits.
Speaker: So, Joe Wilson, who's with Bioresponse, and Sandy Sullivan, both were involved with WR-squared.
Speaker: They use basically the same chemical process.
Speaker: They have different machines.
Speaker: They use different ways of heating it, of stirring it.
Speaker: Machines look different.
Speaker: They have different price points.
Speaker: But it's the same chemical process.
Speaker: Water and sodium are potassium.
Speaker: What we did is when I sold that first system, we knew there were problems with it.
Speaker: You know, sometimes it would take 16, 18 hours at low temp.
Speaker: And the way that's set up is the skull wasn't getting done.
Speaker: So you had typically, you know, a brain left in the cranium, right?
Speaker: Because all the bones would get in the bottom of the basket.
Speaker: They're still having problems with that today.
Speaker: So, you know, I question whether the affluent is even sterile at that point.
Speaker: You know, if you still have tissue left.
Speaker: Ours looks more like a bathtub.
Speaker: and the body's in there and it rocks back and forth.
Speaker: And so at the end, there's no basket that comes out that drips everywhere, right?
Speaker: And our process takes two hours, not 18 hours at low temp.
Speaker: So we have a patent pending on the accelerant for it.
Speaker: And that actually makes it work.
Speaker: And we bring the payments down.
Speaker: So that's very different too.
Speaker: I'll never put anybody's body down the sewer.
Speaker: Well, yeah, well, and see, this is where I think I think there is going to be some confusion with it in terms of if I was going into a funeral home and I don't know anything about this is one of the largest problems I think the funeral industry has is Joe Public is uneducated in this and doesn't want to be educated necessarily in all the stuff we talk about.
Speaker: And so they walk in and they have this third option.
Speaker: And they just they just say, oh, that's that.
Speaker: Yeah, I'll do that.
Speaker: Now, I am in the funeral home and I've chosen this third option.
Speaker: It could be yours.
Speaker: It could be Sandy's.
Speaker: It could be I won't know.
Speaker: You know, I don't know.
Speaker: Or I could be thinking I'm choosing yours, but it could be Sandy's or the other guy.
Speaker: Like letting them know that, you know, there is different ways you can go down with alkaline hydrolysis.
Speaker: You can go down the sewer and go back to the earth.
Speaker: We're the only ones that currently return the body to the earth.
Speaker: No one else.
Speaker: I know that there's some veterinarians and some other people that have had put it back on the earth, but they're putting it back with all the fats and all the salts.
Speaker: So fats and salts aren't good for the earth.
Speaker: Our process at the end, we end up also with something called crystalline, which there's these beautiful crystals in their fats and salts.
Speaker: So that's why the essence, when you pour it out is just liquid.
Speaker: Otherwise, you'd have these formations of fat and salts, which actually kill plants.
Speaker: So you don't want that.
Speaker: And those crystals, are they something the family can keep?
Speaker: Are they something... I give it back if they want it.
Speaker: I tell them about it if they don't want it.
Speaker: We're trying to figure it out.
Speaker: Right now, I think it's got a very high fat content.
Speaker: So we're thinking it might be useful as a biodiesel if people don't want it.
Speaker: But there was a family about 300 yards from where I
Speaker: our facility is that actually did a burial.
Speaker: So they took all the crystalline and they buried it in the ground along with all the essence and the, and the bones of the wife and the mother.
Speaker: It was a beautiful way to go.
Speaker: I mean, they literally did a burial, you know, you know, the difference between the price point to be able to be buried environmentally through our process is a quarter of the cost.
Speaker: You know, our, you know, our process, we were charging $2,495 us.
Speaker: So we've been processing bodies or doing fireless cremation since August of 2019.
Speaker: So you're a year in business of actually selling these units?
Speaker: Well, we were just doing, we were perfecting the process.
Speaker: We're running our original system, but now we're selling systems.
Speaker: So we're manufacturing systems here in Colorado and selling them around the world.
Speaker: Okay, great.
Speaker: And is there any states or countries where there is a unit that you can...
Speaker: started manufacturing the new one.
Speaker: So the one that we have is the very first one of this version.
Speaker: The next ones will come out.
Speaker: There's five of them being developed and they'll be ready in 12 weeks from today.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And are they going anywhere?
Speaker: We know where they're going.
Speaker: Some are still available.
Speaker: So if anybody wants one, I don't think anyone's going to die just to go in these, you know, be the first day.
Speaker: You don't know.
Speaker: People go for celebrity for lots of different reasons.
Speaker: I'm only from jumping the system you can.
Speaker: Yeah, you just don't know.
Speaker: The way you're doing it is manufacturing them and then selling them.
Speaker: Is it to crematoriums?
Speaker: Is it to funeral directors?
Speaker: Is this something that you can, like, because it's got no output, as in a chimney stack, could you put one of these units...
Speaker: on a penthouse building saying Trump Towers in New York City?
Speaker: I don't think I'd want to deal with the security ramp.
Speaker: Not right, Matt.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: These need to be, I mean, technically they could go in a retail location.
Speaker: I wouldn't want to put them, you know, there's zoning that dictates where these go.
Speaker: So by law, they're considered crematories.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Even though they don't have admissions.
Speaker: No one's really said, okay, we're going to make a special zoning for
Speaker: alkaline hydrolysis and the reason is there's chemicals involved so the potassium hydroxide is a pH of 14. you wouldn't really want a chemical spill on the top floor of trump towers right no you definitely wouldn't not a chemical spill of the deceased for sure bodies coming in and out and so you know you got people crying and stuff so yeah i hope you'll see one of trump towers anytime soon
Speaker: It is typically you're selling to industry folk.
Speaker: You're selling to crematoriums, funeral directors.
Speaker: Mostly people that do trade work, you know, are typically people who buy these and then the funeral homes buy them.
Speaker: But then also there's all, you know, people like myself that, you know, didn't have a funeral home before I got into this, just read about it, thought about the environmental impact and decided to do something good for the world that'll do it.
Speaker: So I really think kind of like cremation grew out of a couple of used car salesmen out of
Speaker: California started the Neptune Society, you know, and really started, you know, pushing the funeral homes.
Speaker: I think there's an opportunity for entrepreneurs to set these up in cities and compete with the funeral homes too.
Speaker: Them's fighting words from the funeral community, Ed.
Speaker: We might have to put that in the... We might have to put that in the blooper.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: people what happened.
Speaker: But I mean, I mean, embalming, I wouldn't work with any funeral homes here in Denver that did embalming.
Speaker: But that's not because of the process.
Speaker: It's just because I think embalming is terrible for the environment.
Speaker: But you got to put, I mean, you got to draw a line in the sand somewhere and say, you know, what are you?
Speaker: Are you on the side of your survivors?
Speaker: Or are you just on something that's expedient, you know, because everyone else is getting cremated?
Speaker: Or do you really look at it?
Speaker: And I think
Speaker: this kind of education you're putting on might make people think about what is their impact on their survivors.
Speaker: No one really wants to harm.
Speaker: Granny doesn't want to die in harm.
Speaker: I don't know if you're a granny, but... Mine are all gone, unfortunately.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Buried...
Speaker: In classic Ireland style buried as well, cremation wouldn't have even been... God, Lord, don't even consider cremation.
Speaker: So this would have definitely not... Wouldn't have worked.
Speaker: That would have been better than cremation for them because they could have been buried, but they could have been buried in a way where they could have nourished the beautiful...
Speaker: No, Ed, in Ireland, it's a religious thing.
Speaker: I mean, cremation itself only became something, an option in Ireland.
Speaker: Like, so you've got the whole Catholic thing.
Speaker: I mean, I have a cremation jewellery line.
Speaker: That's something that I started 10 years ago.
Speaker: And even that gets the odd sort of, it's disgraceful what you're doing, because there are some steadfast Catholics who believe that the body should remain intact.
Speaker: entirely so cremation but it's listen that's a whole other podcast because you know the fact that cremation is now allowed all of a sudden and now promoted because we're running out of body space and because the church can make money from it fast forward another 20 years and there'll be all sorts of options money there's a lot of people who don't want to burn twice so what i do with them in ours is we don't burn we just it's we mix the ashes with the glass we we're not the diamond people
Speaker: we're lower lower lower than that we're lower priced than that we don't you know with the carbon again the diamonds i mean that's that's a whole other people like relics so i mean when you're giving back your jewelry you know that's something they keep and it's a keepsake but no one thinks where did the body go when it was spewed out the smokestack so 98 percent of the body gets spewed out the smokestack where did you say granny go yeah granny go she's someone's breathing her right or she's
Speaker: coming back to the earth, you know, whatever was in her teeth and her implants.
Speaker: When we're done, all the implants are sterile and I donate them.
Speaker: They get reused.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That's good.
Speaker: That's good.
Speaker: So they're not getting burned.
Speaker: So, you know, in a typical crematory, a lot of the implants comes out charred and it's destroyed.
Speaker: With ours, any of these implants, very expensive parts can get reused.
Speaker: It's a big difference.
Speaker: Is it fireless cremation?
Speaker: Is that what you're going under?
Speaker: We're going to go under fireless cremation for the systems, yes.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: What's the future for fireless cremations?
Speaker: Well, we've got a very competitive product, right?
Speaker: So there's people looking at alternatives to petrochemical cremation and burial.
Speaker: You've got green burial.
Speaker: I think what we've got is a price point.
Speaker: We're selling these for $125,000 US.
Speaker: We've got the lowest price point, and that's
Speaker: not done because we were not maximizing profit.
Speaker: What we're trying to do is have a bigger impact on reducing carbon.
Speaker: You know, we talk, talk about the carbon dioxide and all the pollutants.
Speaker: If I can make this competitive with a crematory price wise, why would anyone buy another petrochemical cremation?
Speaker: So, you know, anybody who owns a stock and some of these crematory companies, I mean, you might want to keep an eye on, you know, some of the Matthew industries of the world.
Speaker: I don't know how they're going to compete.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: I think every funeral home should have start offering this.
Speaker: You know, it's typically most funeral homes don't have their own crematories.
Speaker: And it's just because of the overhead.
Speaker: And plus, it's become a commodity to burn a body.
Speaker: So you just you ship it out to a third party person, pay them a couple hundred bucks and you don't have to deal with it.
Speaker: And then all these people who work in these crematories have to get tested for mercury every year, at least here in Colorado.
Speaker: They're tested.
Speaker: So everyone knows there's environmental issues with cremations.
Speaker: And even people who have crematories are looking at this as an option.
Speaker: So I think if, you know, once they see our process and it takes a couple hours, it's clean, they can offer a new service, a new burial that doesn't involve a cemetery and a casket.
Speaker: You tell me, I mean, when I look at it, I see a very rosy future for the world and for our business, you know, with alkaline hydrolysis 2.0.
Speaker: I don't know how else anyone would want to go.
Speaker: Why would you want to be burned when you could be returned to the earth?
Speaker: Which you talk about from a biblical standpoint, that's kind of what people want, you know, not ashes to ashes.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: You know, greener patches.
Speaker: We'd have to change that graveside reading then to what would we be turning to ashes to essence and bone or I don't know.
Speaker: I love the idea.
Speaker: I love the rose tinted glasses look of the world, Ed, because I do that myself and I do hope and pray for a better world.
Speaker: I do think innovations like this in the industry are massively important.
Speaker: And that's part of the reason why I wanted to do this podcast, because for the last 10 years, I have talked and met the most interesting people.
Speaker: And I didn't have a funeral background.
Speaker: I do now.
Speaker: But I feel like there's still so much...
Speaker: that the public don't know and want to know.
Speaker: I get asked such fascinating questions as I'm sure you probably do.
Speaker: I mean, I know you pitched, you were in some fundraising competition and you won, I think, right?
Speaker: Yeah, there was 150 companies competed and it was a $100,000 pitch competition.
Speaker: I had some fun.
Speaker: You know, I talked about, you know, what really happens during cremation in our process.
Speaker: And, you know, if you tell people the truth and it resonates with them, clearly it did in that competition.
Speaker: I just think people should be more transparent.
Speaker: I don't think, I think people can deal with it.
Speaker: You talk about people are grieving when I, when I bring people in, I don't do any dressing of any bodies for visitation.
Speaker: I just pull them out.
Speaker: Even if they've been autopsy on a gurney and tell them they're going to look dead.
Speaker: Their eyes are going to be sunken in a little, their cheeks going to be in.
Speaker: We don't put any makeup on them, maybe wipe the blood off.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And they look dead and that helps with the grieving process.
Speaker: And you know, I'm a psych major from Harvard.
Speaker: So, you know, I,
Speaker: I look at this and I watch the people's reaction compared to somebody in a coffin that's been filled with formalin, formaldehyde, which is a known carcinogen.
Speaker: And even funeral directors don't like doing that anymore.
Speaker: They outsource that too, because they know the person who's doing it probably is going to die of some weird cancer.
Speaker: I mean, obviously funeral directors have very odd cancers that most of us don't get, or most people don't get.
Speaker: But anyway, the whole death and dying process is just very normal.
Speaker: And to,
Speaker: take it and make it into a circus doesn't make any sense to us.
Speaker: I mean, I can see Reverend body care, you know, where you're cleaning a body and yourself.
Speaker: I like home funerals.
Speaker: Um, when my mother died, I put her in a, um, a cooler, you know, a freezer, cause she was going to Arlington cemetery.
Speaker: Uh, and it's four to six months before she would go with her husband who was in Vietnam and anywhere.
Speaker: She wanted to be with him and they didn't have alkaline hydrolysis in Maryland.
Speaker: So the funeral directors all went in Balmer because she would have been in a pool for 26 months.
Speaker: And I said, no, I just bought a freezer in a friend's basement and took care of myself.
Speaker: But people don't think outside of the box.
Speaker: They go in, they're grieving, you know, even with pre-me, you know, these big companies, which now I'm selling to, right?
Speaker: Like the SEIs in the world.
Speaker: I'd love for them to change their behavior.
Speaker: But there's a lot of money in embalming.
Speaker: There's a lot of money in selling caskets, right?
Speaker: There's a lot of money in selling prayer cards.
Speaker: You just go on, you know, the limos, all that's unnecessary to be returned to the earth.
Speaker: It's like I keep saying on this podcast, it is a business.
Speaker: It is an industry.
Speaker: And I know people are allergic to that word because it sounds awful, but I'm like, people make money from it.
Speaker: So it is an industry.
Speaker: There's inputs, there's outputs, there's profits.
Speaker: It's a business.
Speaker: It's an industry.
Speaker: You shouldn't feel like you have to do it.
Speaker: And people don't know there's these options.
Speaker: So there's,
Speaker: There's various groups that try to help people work through it.
Speaker: And I think if someone wants to spend a lot of money on a funeral, so be it.
Speaker: You want a casket that's supposedly going to last 100 years?
Speaker: Go for it.
Speaker: You want to be buried on the top of Mount Sinai?
Speaker: Go ahead.
Speaker: Pay a million bucks to be next to a famous person at Fairmont or something, right?
Speaker: It's just amazing.
Speaker: Well, just on that, actually, I mean, Michael Jackson's 24 karat gold casket that he had.
Speaker: Like what happens to the casket?
Speaker: Like what's the is there a casket involved in your process?
Speaker: What's the price for your process versus cremation for Joe Public?
Speaker: And do they purchase a special casket?
Speaker: Do is it can they buy a regular one?
Speaker: Do they rent one?
Speaker: What's the situation with that?
Speaker: We don't sell any caskets.
Speaker: We sell no goods or services.
Speaker: So when I was done, um, sustainable funeral before I just started on fireless cremation, our price list only included one option, which was the, you know, fireless cremation.
Speaker: We sold no goods or services.
Speaker: The body came back.
Speaker: The bones came back in a cotton bag tied with jute strength and the casket, we call them plaskets because they're five gallon plastic jugs, right?
Speaker: So the essence in those and five gallons is
Speaker: a little over 40 pounds.
Speaker: So we ended up giving people four or five or even six five gallon containers to take back with them.
Speaker: And we don't charge for that.
Speaker: We ask them to return it so we can reuse them.
Speaker: And if they lived far away, they could recycle them.
Speaker: But you could actually ship a body that way from, let's say, Denver to Florida for $160.
Speaker: Now, you tell me what it would cost to ship a body air freight from Denver to Florida.
Speaker: It might be at least $3,000.
Speaker: If you don't have to drop them off, you need the air freight, pay to be picked up at the airport.
Speaker: This way here, we just ship your plasticids and your bones to wherever you want to be, you know, final wrestling place, right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, effectively, granny goes on to a place or a tray of some form.
Speaker: and goes into your unit.
Speaker: How large is your unit?
Speaker: Will it fit in regular crematoriums?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it's about seven feet by three feet wide all in.
Speaker: So, and it'll hold a 500 pound decedent.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And one at a time?
Speaker: We only do one at a time.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: They come in on a gurney and then the new one's designed with a mortuary lift.
Speaker: So the body goes in, it's dropped into this, you know, basically a spa, you know, into a tub.
Speaker: Um, and then it closes the lid.
Speaker: And then when it's done, all the essence is pumped until we call it an essence fill station where it sits.
Speaker: And that's where the crystalline form.
Speaker: They come out.
Speaker: Then the plastic gets, gets filled with the essence and all the bones are the small, Sandy bones are collected in a, in a grid collector, the great collector.
Speaker: I'm sorry.
Speaker: collects all the sandy bones the big bones are still inside the vessel so the field director would take the skull on the femur and the tibula whatever other big bones are left in there and remove those and then they have to dry and then they go on a cremulator like you know you know something that breaks the bones up yeah okay so you still use the cremulator to grind the bones yeah typically like i said you know anywhere from typically a third to
Speaker: Just depends on the body.
Speaker: Some bodies, their bones just break apart.
Speaker: I don't know if they've got, you know, the collagen is gone or what, but we've had people where four times as much of their bigger bones is standing bones.
Speaker: So we weigh the bones right now because you know, there's a new process for, I mean, we've been doing it for over a year, right?
Speaker: This new chemical process from a scientific standpoint, figure out the best way to do it.
Speaker: And it's just very interesting to see people's bone density have an impact on how much Sandy bones
Speaker: on regular alkaline hydrolysis with going down the sewer.
Speaker: And that's a real problem.
Speaker: And I won't say the name, but there's people that have some of these other systems where they have to collect that sandy bone before it goes down the sewer and also get the fats out.
Speaker: They won't let it go down into the sanitary sewer system.
Speaker: It's not good for the waste treatment system.
Speaker: Yeah, I can imagine.
Speaker: So effectively you go into granny goes into a warm bath for a couple of hours.
Speaker: That's kind of a gentle way to put it.
Speaker: I mean, that's kind of what I do.
Speaker: I mean, basically he's going into a chemical bath that's going to break down her, her body.
Speaker: So, I mean, yeah, you hear people say it's a water commission in this bowl.
Speaker: It's not a water commission.
Speaker: You put a body in water and tell me how long it takes to break down.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: If you put no heat and stuff.
Speaker: So, I mean,
Speaker: I hate the name water cremation personally, but because you really are using chemicals and the chemicals have a purpose.
Speaker: One is to break down the fats, which we do.
Speaker: The other one is to do a dissolution of all the proteins in the body and the tissue.
Speaker: And then you got to use another chemical if you want to bring it down to something that's good for the earth to bring the pH down.
Speaker: So it's really is instead of petrochemicals, it's actually chemicals that add value to the nutrients in your body.
Speaker: So at the end, like I said, you're more beneficial than, you know, if you died of exposure when you're hiking here in Colorado and scavengers got you.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You're better off having your loved ones go up and pour you out in the mountains.
Speaker: You're adding more nutrients back to the earth.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because that's what the chemicals do.
Speaker: They add nutrients.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You know, there's not.
Speaker: I mean, if you're a biologist, you would, you know, or grew stuff, a botanist, you would know how valuable, you know, the nutrients are in your body.
Speaker: So I can see the benefits of this for the funeral directors, but I can also see where they'll fight you on it because they're losing out on their casket sales and everything.
Speaker: It's definitely sounds like something that, as you said, somebody who's not even in the industry could purchase one of these units and in some ways go into head to head with the funeral directors because it's going to be a lot lower cost.
Speaker: What's the average cost or charge that a funeral director or other person would charge for this?
Speaker: I would say a realistic price is going to be somewhere around $2,000.
Speaker: I know some funeral homes are charging more than double that.
Speaker: People are paying it where it's at.
Speaker: But there's no casket.
Speaker: There's no embalming.
Speaker: There's no other charges.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: I mean, you can embalm if you want.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's just pointless.
Speaker: I don't know why a funeral director would want to embalm.
Speaker: I mean, it just makes no sense to put your own personal self at risk.
Speaker: Well, it's interesting because when you were describing, I'm personally not a fan of embalming.
Speaker: That's just for me.
Speaker: But when you were describing what you did or do for a family, I personally, I'd be very against that also.
Speaker: As in, that's just my own personal because I actually was talking quite recently on another podcast episode about how because I do what I do and I work in the business I work in,
Speaker: When my loved ones pass away, people assume I want to see them dead when we have wakes in Ireland and things like that.
Speaker: Now, they are typically embalmed.
Speaker: I don't.
Speaker: Usually, I don't want to see them because I want to remember them laughing.
Speaker: I want to remember them as they were.
Speaker: So, like what you described there, I find that, oh, that would be offensive to me because...
Speaker: Sometimes I think people do need closure.
Speaker: I definitely do.
Speaker: And there may be somebody I lose in my life that I will need that type of closure because I just won't believe it otherwise.
Speaker: But I don't think everybody is prepared mentally, emotionally, spiritually for seeing something like what you're talking about.
Speaker: And I do think there is benefits to embalming in some respect to the embalming and the makeup and all of that for people that want to see their loved one and have...
Speaker: you know, a moment with them.
Speaker: I don't agree with embalming from a chemical point of view.
Speaker: It's just adding more.
Speaker: I mean, people talk about how Coke and Diet Coke is bad for your body.
Speaker: I think, well, I mean, you're going to choose embalming when you die.
Speaker: So, you know, you're pumping all sorts of chemicals into you then.
Speaker: Yeah, I've just had bad experience as well myself with people I know and care about.
Speaker: I've walked in and I've seen them in coffins and caskets and they just didn't look like themselves as far as I was concerned.
Speaker: And I wish I'd never seen them that way because now my memory of them is distorted.
Speaker: I agree.
Speaker: It could be an individual thing, but I think seeing people look dead helps with the grieving process.
Speaker: That's been my experience.
Speaker: Most funeral directors wouldn't do that, partly because I think, one, you think it's more respectful to make their, you know, plump their skin up
Speaker: You can do it with makeup.
Speaker: You don't have to add formalin to pump up.
Speaker: Basically, you're just dealing with the face, typically, right?
Speaker: Or hands.
Speaker: So you can put makeup on it.
Speaker: You don't really need to put formalin and make someone look pink.
Speaker: I mean, I look plenty pink.
Speaker: Just put some rouge on me, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm going to hold you to that, Ed.
Speaker: On your deathbed, I'll come over and I'll rouge you up.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: But I would say seeing people that are dead look dead gets you past the point that, geez, you know, you accept the fact that that person looks dead.
Speaker: We should be used to seeing people looking dead, not looking like they're somehow asleep.
Speaker: That's my personal opinion, but I'll never change that.
Speaker: So I'm not fighting that problem.
Speaker: Yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: And that's fine.
Speaker: That was absolutely amazing.
Speaker: Thank you so much for filling us in on everything.
Speaker: I'm sure I'll probably need to have a follow-up episode because I have a feeling there'll be a lot of questions, whether it's industry or other on that.
Speaker: We'll leave all your information below the podcast.
Speaker: So what do you think, guys?
Speaker: Would you get fireless cremation?
Speaker: Have it done to your loved one?
Speaker: Or would you choose it for yourself in a pre-plan?
Speaker: Let us know in the comments.
Speaker: Glamreaperpodcast at gmail.com That's Glamreaperpodcast at gmail.com We'll talk to you soon.
