ARVADA — On a dead-end street lined with auto body shops on the industrial edge of this city sits a low-slung, brick building where Ed Gazvoda works without automobile lifts, stud welders or dual-action sanders.
Instead, Gazvoda has a tilting stainless-steel chamber into which he fits human bodies, a collection of plastic jugs to store the remains — or “essence” — and a sledgehammer to break up the bones.
“We’re the only real body shop,” he said wryly of his 5-month-old enterprise, Sustainable Funeral.
Gallows humor comes with the territory when you’re in the business of disposing of the dead.
In Gazvoda’s case, the Harvard grad and crematory licensee is a disciple of a still-emerging method of human disposition: alkaline hydrolysis. Using heat, water and a strong base — potassium hydroxide, in this case — a body can be dissolved into liquid and bone in a matter of hours.
According to the Cremation Association of North America, alkaline hydrolysis mimics what happens in natural decomposition as part of a burial, “just sped up dramatically by the chemicals.”
Proponents of the practice, also referred to as resomation, aquamation or water cremation, tout it as the most environmentally friendly way to complete the final step of human life. Instead of releasing carbon dioxide, and mercury from dental fillings, into the air through conventional cremation or digging up ever scarcer land for graves, alkaline hydrolysis chemically reduces the body to a brown, sterile DNA-free liquid — essentially salts, sugars and amino acids — that can later be used as fertilizer in a garden or farmer’s field.
“It breaks apart the atoms and molecules in your body,” Gazvoda said. “It’s by far the greenest way to go. It’s the future of the funeral industry because people want to do good when they die.”
Ecological benefit
It’s the way Cecilia Girz chose to lay her husband of 23 years to rest this past summer. Girz, a retired meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, was sold on the method based on its smaller ecological footprint.
Her husband, she said, was adamant about not being embalmed, which employs a host of chemicals, including formaldehyde.
“It uses fewer resources than burial or flame cremation and you end up with an organic substance,” she said. “You’re going back to the earth that you came from.”
That’s important to Girz, who said both she and her late husband were avid gardeners. She obtained his essence after his death in August and has been applying it to the garden they once tended together.
“He was a terrific gardener and it seems really appropriate to have his remains dispersed that way,” Girz said choking up. “I’m remembering him and how much pleasure he took in gardening.”
Girz learned about alkaline hydrolysis at a caregivers symposium where Karen van Vuuren was a speaker. Van Vuuren runs The Natural Funeral in Lafayette, which bills itself as “Colorado’s first independent, holistic funeral home.” She works with Gazvoda’s Sustainable Funeral to provide her clients with what her company calls water cremation.
One client told van Vuuren that she “just wanted to be compost” after she passed.
“She was super excited that there was a process that would make her a blessing to the earth rather than a burden,” van Vuuren said. “People want to feel with death that there is some legacy that is positive.”
Alkaline hydrolysis has been increasing in popularity since it was first used for human disposition on a commercial basis in the United States less than a decade ago. There are now 20 states that allow it, says the Cremation Association of North America. Colorado was one of the early adopters, with the Colorado Legislature passing a bill in 2011 that made “chemical methods” an accepted form of body disposition in the state.
And just as it took cremation until 2015 to eclipse burial as the preferred form of disposition in this country, advocates think alkaline hydrolysis will claim a larger share of the $20 billion end-of-life industry as people increasingly worried about global warming and contamination begin to embrace it.
“Weirdest thing I do”
Gazvoda has been on the cutting edge of the practice, launching a company out of his then-home in Lafayette eight years ago called CycleLife. He also invented a cheekily named container to get the job done: the Coffin Spa.
He said technology in this area has improved since then. At Sustainable Funeral, Gazvoda places the body in a stainless steel container surrounded by a wooden box, which is vented with an exhaust outlet. Water and potassium hydroxide (or caustic potash), along with an accelerant, is fed into the container.
Gazvoda tilts his contraption, which is heated to 170 degrees, back and forth to “bring fresh chemical to the cadaver.” Two hours later, all that’s left is fluid, bones and any medical devices or artificial joints the person may have had implanted. Gazvoda climbs into the container and removes the bones and bone fragments and dries them out with a fan.
“It is a labor of love getting the bones out,” he said.
The essence is poured into jugs (the typical adult body produces 25 to 35 gallons, Gazvoda said) while the bones are placed in a cotton bag. Gazvoda places the bag on a cinder block and, with a sledgehammer, crushes the bones, which are returned to the family much in the way ashes are returned to loved ones from a traditional cremation.
“This is probably the weirdest thing I do,” he said, gripping the hammer with both hands.
Some families want the essence back to pour over their gardens while others just want the bone. Gazvoda gives what liquid isn’t claimed to area farmers, who put it on their fields. So far he has disposed of seven bodies using what he calls Alkaline Hydrolysis 2.0.
The cost to families — he charges $2,500 — is a bit more expensive than traditional flame cremation but cheaper than a burial, with its expensive casket, embalming and cemetery space. But Gazvoda said the benefit to the environment of alkaline hydrolysis — which he predicts will be a “disrupter for the whole funeral industry” — is hard to calculate.
“For $2,500, that’s actually a cheap way to go out of this world and do some good,” he said.
