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The misunderstood funeral tech that's illegal in 30 states
Here's some of the juicy quotes:
When you die, your body is going to decompose. It starts from the moment you pass. Your organs begin to shut down. Hair stops growing, skin recedes. Some parts of the body take longer than others, but eventually, as with all things, it all starts to break down. If you opt for a traditional burial, your remains will spend years nestled within a casket underground, progressing into a deeper state of decomposition. If you opt for a traditional flame-based cremation, you eliminate any further decomposition by burning it to a halt. But there's also another alternative -- one designed to accelerate the decomposition process through the medium of water. It's known as alkaline hydrolysis, or water cremation. One part spa, one part chemical blend, a few hours of a swirling soak, and your earthly remains are no longer. There are undeniable benefits to this process. In 2011, a study from the University of Groningen compared conventional burial, cremation, alkaline hydrolysis and cryomation and found that alkaline hydrolysis had the lowest overall environmental footprint. 
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What happens to the residue.?Don't we contain enough heavy metals by the time we're old that it would have to be treated as toxic waste?
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As the article stated:
There are undeniable benefits to this process. In
2011, a study from the University of Groningen compared conventional
burial, cremation, alkaline hydrolysis and cryomation and found that
alkaline hydrolysis had the lowest overall environmental footprint.
Regardless of how to decompose a body the heavy metals and so forth in our bodies will be the same.
I'll just accept what they say as fact.
You know, back in the day I was working a temporary gig through Manpower, Inc. where an environmental scientific monitoring company was doing a before and after of people located near a large sewage plant that was being built. They were concerned with cadmium. It was very interesting work. One night they needed volunteers to take little samples of human poop and put them into like test tubes. So, for $100 or was it just $50 I did that for an hour or so. I felt guilty for making so much money that I offered them some money back, but they wouldn't hear of it.
That was probably the best job I ever had in my whole life.
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Haha, the best job I had was also with poop, huge quantities of it. As a very poor student, a summer job disposing of sewage on farms was brilliant. In a couple of weeks I earned what I was supposed to live on for an entire term. I'd driven tractors before, but not so much. With the interview test drive, things went wrong. The cab filled with so much smoke I had to jump out. I'd just left the hand brake on, but the tractor was so huge and powerful, a little thing like that was easy not to notice. I was very surprised to be given the job anyway.
Clearly the foreman was disappointed from day one and things went downhill with him continuously. I was unreliable, often late. One day the holding tank was brimming full, and another lorry load was expected and the bonus-inspired work was about to be held up again, on account of me. Well, I picked up my trailer as quick as I could, backed it to the holding tank, filled it up, and shot off to the field for spreading it. I did it in such a hurry that when I came back for a refill, there was the foreman, glowering more than ever. Fuming in fact. I hit reverse, looked back and the trailer had gone, and I hadn't noticed! He leaped into the tractor and we went to the field to look for it. It had come off the tractor at high speed, and the front part was buried deep in the ground. A new trailer! The foreman went to find the boss, so he could get me sacked at last. I waited by the holding tank, and then decided to see how broken the trailer was. I tied the tractor to the back of it and pulled, and it came out of the ground, entirely intact. So I hitched it up again, emptied it and went back for more. The lorry must have been delayed, because by the time the boss and the foreman got back, the holding tank was empty and I was backed up ready and waiting. Clearly the foreman had over-reacted! When the boss left, the foreman informed me in a very convincing way that he was going to bring a knife in to work on Monday, and if I showed up, I'd get it.
It was with more trepidation than usual then that I showed up on Monday, only to be told that the man had gone to a wedding on Saturday and had been stabbed. He wouldn't be back. Which meant much more work for me. Grace, see?
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was set to be a cracker. We had a huge almost level field where the wheat harvest had been taken, and it was close to the sewage works, so the lorries took less than 5 minutes to get to the field. It looked like we would be in for a great bonus.
Even better, once we started, we found the field was so baked hard that we didn't need to do the usual rigmarole of emptying the lorries into a holding tank, and using tractors and trailers to empty the tank. The lorries were able to drive right onto the field and spread the sewage themselves.
My job that day was driving the tractor with the harrow, to bury the sludge as soon as it hit the ground. Unfortunately, I found that lowering the harrow lifted the back wheels of the tractor enough that the sludge on top of the baked ground gave no grip. I couldn't do the job. And then, there was a pool of sludge forming by the gateway and the lorries were skidding themselves and getting stuck. I had to give up my unsuccessful efforts at harrowing, and instead pull the lorries out of the sludge. The lake was getting deeper.
Usually, going to hitch up to a lorry, I drove slowly, because it was so slippery. I decided that if I used the harrow at high speed like a parachute, I'd be able to stop quickly, so to put the frighteners onto one of the drivers, I headed towards him at full speed, and dropped the harrow at the last moment. I didn't stop as suddenly as expected. Instead, what happened was the due to the speed of the tractor, the harrow was able to break through the baked crust of the ground, and I found myself ploughing at 25 mph. Luckily, the tractor did stop when I took my foot off the accelerator, and I was able to avoid hitting the lorry.
So my new technique to ploughing the sludge in was to get up to top speed in top gear on a dry bit of field, then drop the harrow when I hit the sludge. The effect was dramatic. I was ploughing at top speed instead of the usual crawl. Shit and earth flew up 15-20 feet high behind me (mostly, some landed on the tractor somehow). I remember doing the edge of the field, and overtaking an old couple driving along the lane, with my spectacular plume of sludge rising up behind me.
We got the whole field done and were set for a huge bonus. The boss showed up at the end with the cash. He was astonished at the state of my tractor - covered in shit except where I'd used the screen wipers, and the exhaust manifold was glowing bright red. The boss decided we couldn't have the bonus we'd earned, or the company would insist on changing the bonus scheme. Still we were paid very well, and it was a great end to my shit career.
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Oh for the glory days before health & safety.
Like you & many others of us who wandered off the secure career path into the transient employment jungle, due to putting someone else as no.1 rather than ourselves, I recognise your old job. I've done a few of those myself.
I must say though that my present job, though nowhere near as well paid as some of those earlier ones, is definitely 'the best', so much so that I'm still enjoying doing it 4 yrs after retirement age. I can't help it if I'm lucky.
There's a car park in Stoke-on-Trent & various other places round & about there, where you could park an ocean liner & it wouldn't crack. That's because old mine workings were stabilised by pumping liquid concrete into them. The guys who drilled the holes & pumped the concrete were paid by the cubic metre used.
I was one of them, & boy did we pump thousands of those fuckers, the trick being to keep going when the pressure gauge on the pump went into the red. Why stop when there's money at stake. The whole rig would either shoot out of the ground in a fountain of concrete, which happened only once to me, or would burst through underground to another cavity, whoopee.......those holes just drank money & we got a grand share.
You get worn out fast earning big blue collar wages though, so that wasn't for me.
The owner/operator of the rig was ex British army & his 2 associates were both Irish. One was young & a convinced IRA supporter, the other was much older & already going deaf due to the noise. Someone who thought nothing of flying to Australia for a few months to get a job when things were slack, then coming back to hitch up with the crew when it picked up again. That blew my mind.
When it comes to making a living political differences go by the board is my observation.
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A friend's son earns a fortune polishing wind turbine blades. They get pitted, so the surface needs smoothing out occasionally. Best pay seems to be out in the North Sea. Wouldn't fancy that. Don't like heights. He also flies to Australia to clean and fix skyscrapers in Sydney.
I spent a week down a deep hole that was OK. It was for the foundations of a pillar for a motorway bridge. Must have been 30-40 feet deep. The job was to make it deeper with a pneumatic drill. Only, the noise in the steel lined hole horrendous, even with ear defenders on. There always had to be two down the hole and one at the top on watch. So we just didn't do it, unless the one at the top warned us the foreman was coming. No-one was coming down the hole to see how deep it was, and it seemed no-one thought to check how much we brought up. I read a whole stack of Beano's and a bit of Macbeth.
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spreading the sewage on the fields - these days it's an environmental tick of approval but back then we would not have liked the idea it was getting anywhere near our veggies but it was already happening.
I'm terribly impressed at the way you got the trailer unstuck and the job done while the foreman was off fuming instead, but omg what an evil man - preparing teenagers for the work force should contain the warning beware the professional foreman, they are dangerous. good grief.
and you showed up on the Monday! the money must have been really good. Thank goodness for the grace. 
I was once targeted by the foreman of a production line at a soft drink canning factory. She was an evil woman and wanted to have a chat in the alley and I had literally done nothing to offend her other than exist. I was scared, I scooted out of work a few minutes early doing a dash through the front offices to take a different route. Come to think of it the money wasn't that good but I went back too, what was I thinking of. Fortunately I was rescued by divine intervention - my job was checking the machinery and I noticed an anomaly in temperatures which wasn't on my checklist but odd so I went and found the engineers and they said that if I hadn't done that the whole plant would have blown. I was adopted by the engineers, I got a nickname - Whisp. She couldn't touch me after that.
At least not for a little while but by then I must have been gone for the next festival, by his grace.
Here's my lighthouse, finished but not fired - thought I'd take a pic now incase it doesn't make it.
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Great story about the engineers.
Is that glass? How big is it? It looks really good and cheery.
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yes, it's quite big - approx 260 x 500mm. one layer of clear glass then one layer made up of little bits of coloured glass and then another layer of clear on top. Hopefully when I fire I will capture lots of little bubbles - that makes it sparkle in the light. Won't know til it's done, at that size I'm really not confident I will get the result I want but thought it through very carefully adjusting the design to give me the best chance - originally I was going to go a bit 3d with piled glass in the middle to make it look like the lighthouse is more than halfway underwater but then I started thinking about it getting too thick in the middle and the glass spreading when it's liquid, and I thought about giant bubbles getting caught under the fast slumping top sheet. but you know basically I just liked the lighthouse too much to obscure it and I liked the colours so I added a bit of headland and hoped the feel of the design would be carried by the night sky above the sea. and I think it does - it's situational, it's for my back door and when this house was built it was in view of the lighthouse (trees have grown over the view now). And it is topical - the feeling of being late in the day, the lighthouse is becoming submerged but it is still shining brightly.
Now can you ask 13 why he wanted to give the other driver a fright - that's my question!
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