New Kansas City business hopes water cremation will catch on. But how does it work?
For Jarrod Hammond, this all started with some casual internet research.
“It’s kind of strange to say that I decided to do this after binging a YouTube channel for a couple months,” he said. “But that’s more or less what got me thinking about it.”
The more he learned about the emerging practice of water cremation, an alternative to fire-based cremation, the more he was interested. But an unexpected layoff from Cerner Corp. last year pushed him to launch a new business, bringing the practice to Kansas City.
His Heartland Pet Aquamation in Kansas City’s West Bottoms now offers water-based cremation to pet owners and veterinary clinics. Eventually, he’d like to move into the human market, offering water cremation as an alternative to traditional burial or cremation.
Also known as alkaline hydrolysis, the process uses water and chemicals to break down body tissue inside a heated, pressurized container. This essentially speeds up the decomposition process, breaking tissue down to liquids that can be flushed away. As with fire-based cremation, the remaining bone fragments are then pulverized into a fine powder commonly referred to as ashes that can be placed into an urn.
Advocates say this method is gentler and greener than traditional cremation, which releases carbon into the atmosphere.
“Nobody’s ever been burned and liked it,” Hammond said. “But water is something that is at the foundation of so many cultural metaphors that it’s very familiar, it’s very comforting.”
Yet, it’s by no means mainstream. Hammond believes his is the only pet service in the Kansas City area. And funeral industry experts say a St. Louis firm is the only one offering human water cremations in Missouri or Kansas.
Whether it’s for pets or people, the requisite equipment is an expensive investment. And so far, there’s little demand for the service in the area, said Pam Scott, executive director of the Kansas Funeral Directors Association.
“We’ve been talking about it for a long time and it’s never really taken off,” she said. “So I don’t know that there’s really a lot of interest out there.”
But Hammond believes interest is growing. Even if it’s not widely adopted in the industry, he thinks consumers are drawn to the idea — once they learn about it.
“The death care industry is pretty slow to adapt,” he said. “That said, I have talked to one or two funeral directors in town who are interested in the practice. And more so than professionally, I’ve had just regular people express interest.”
What is water cremation?
Alkaline hydrolysis has been in use for well over a century, according to the Cremation Association of North America, which in 2010 expanded its definition of cremation to include processes like alkaline hydrolysis.
It was initially used to convert animal carcasses into animal fertilizer. Over the years, universities and hospitals have used the process to dispose of human cadavers and medical waste. But it wasn’t brought to the consumer funeral market until 2011.
CANA literature says that alkaline hydrolysis mirrors traditional cremation: fat and tissues are converted to basic organic compounds. In a crematorium, carbon dioxide and water vapor are released into the air. In a water cremation, sterile salts, sugars, amino acids and peptides are released into wastewater systems.
Fewer than half of states allow the practice for humans and only about 30 businesses offer the service, according to the association.
But the advent of water cremation comes at a time of “rapid growth” for traditional cremation rates in both Kansas and Missouri. In Kansas, 54.6% of the 27,213 deaths in 2018 resulted in cremation, according to the association. In Missouri, 49% of the 65,507 deaths in 2018 resulted in cremation.
And cremation has only grown in popularity throughout the pandemic as some families postpone large funeral services because of safety concerns.
“It’s certainly trending more towards cremation. Obviously there’s more flexibility with cremation,” said Parker Amos, president of Amos Family Funeral Home and Crematory.
The Shawnee funeral home has been offering pet cremation services for more than a decade, Amos said. But there are few other businesses competing in that space, he said.
“For us, it’s a way to establish a relationship with someone,” he said. “What we always tell families is we’re here to take care of your entire family — pets and humans.”
Amos said he’s heard about water cremation through trade industry groups, but hasn’t seriously researched it. His funeral home isn’t interested in the process for either pets or humans now, but he said that could change if consumer preferences evolve.
“It’s something that has been brought up,” he said. “But it really hasn’t caught on.”
Currently, most veterinary clinics outsource pet cremations, said Dr. Stacey Nickell, president of the Kansas City Veterinary Medical Association. Customers can choose a general cremation to dispose of pets or individual cremations that return ashes to owners.
Nickell, who practices at Eagle Animal Hospital, said her clinic and many others in the Northland rely on Rolling Acres Memorial Gardens for Pets, a pet cemetery and crematorium.
“Most clinics don’t privately offer it,” she said.
Nickell said she didn’t know much about water cremation for pets or how much interest there would be from customers. She plans to meet with Hammond to learn more about the process.
“I’m kind of curious,” she said. “I don’t know anything about this new one and I’m a little bit interested to find out more.”
From layoff to a new business
Hammond worked at Cerner for 12 years building software for medical imaging services.
He didn’t have a lot of passion for the work, but it was a good job that “paid the bills and then some,” he said. Cerner, the metro area’s largest private employer, has made several rounds of layoffs in recent months.
While his job loss came as a surprise, Hammond said it offered him an opportunity. And a generous severance package gave him the time to build out his own business.
A startup loan from AltCap, an organization that provides financing to small businesses across the Kansas City area, helped him purchase equipment and open his shop.
While another business previously offered water cremation for pets in Johnson County, his is the only one in the area now open, he said. His service begins at $50 for communal cremation and goes up to $250 or more per individual animal, depending on size.
He understands the concept can sound odd at first. Some are reminded of images from comic book pages or scenes on AMC’s “Breaking Bad” series in which characters used hydrofluoric acid to dispose of bodies.
That’s why he’s tried to open his doors, allowing customers, animal shelters and veterinarians to see how the process works. It’s fairly quiet, as the shiny stainless steel equipment in the back completes the work over the course of 18 hours.
“I want very much to be at the forefront of transparency,” he said.
Hammond doesn’t think the idea will catch on overnight. But he believes that demand will increase as more people learn about water cremation. Some are drawn to the environmental benefits, while others just prefer the idea of water over fire.
For Maureen Murray, Heartland Pet Aquamation was the closest place she could find to her home outside of Minneapolis.
As her pitbull Pony was being treated for leukemia, she searched for water cremation services in Minneapolis but found none for pets. In the past, she had her dogs cremated through fire, so she could keep their remains in urns and lockets.
But she doesn’t like the idea of her pets getting burned up. On a recent outing to a nearby lake with her dogs, Murray saw billows of smoke rising up from an apartment complex.
There was so much that she called 911. The operator asked her to check and ensure it wasn’t smoke from a nearby funeral home.
“Sure enough, it was the funeral home. They were cremating people,” Murray said. “That was just bad.”
She sees water cremation as a much friendlier alternative. She raised her dog on organic food and she likes that this process is easier on the environment.
“It’s gentle. You’re not burning your pet,” she said. “That just gave me a lot of comfort.”
‘It’s just water’
On the other side of the state, Jon Hughes has been pioneering water cremation for humans in the St. Louis area.
A licensed funeral director, he spent years building up a business on the side before going full-time this year.
While working in traditional funeral homes, he never thought much of water cremation. But a casual conversation with his wife, who is a nurse, planted the seed.
“She just happened to say ‘man, that sounds so much better than fire based cremation,’” he recalled. “That one comment really took hold.”
His Hughes Funeral Alternatives, which advertises “flameless cremation,” is the only such business in the state, he said. To him, the benefits of this process are two-fold.
“I never did like the thought of putting somebody in fire. It just never did really sit well with me,” he said. “They can get the same end result, but to me I think it’s psychologically better. And the environmental effects speak for themselves.”
One driver of cremation’s increasing popularity is the mobility of American society. Unlike a casket in a permanent burial plot, cremated remains can move around with relatives. And just like with fire cremation, water cremation allows mourners to put remains in urns, transform them into jewelry or scatter them in a special place.
“It’s just water,” Hughes said. “It’s the same as when you’re doing a fire based cremation and smoke is going in the air. That’s the body being broken down into its simplest form.”
Hughes said his service, which takes 12 to 18 hours to complete, costs about a quarter of the cost of a traditional burial.
After Missouri began allowing water cremation, Catholic bishops in the state publicly opposed the process, saying “ it fails to fully respect the dignity that is owed to the deceased.”
The Catholic church has allowed traditional cremation since 1963, but forbids scattering ashes or storing them at home. In 2018, the St. Louis archdiocese acknowledged that water cremation, like fire cremation, speeds up decomposition of the body. But it objected to the discharge of liquid remains through the sewer system and told parishioners to avoid the practice “until another suitable means of disposing of the liquid remnant can be established.”
Hughes said he and his wife left the Catholic church after that decision. But he said it’s indicative of the misunderstanding some have about the process.
“They think it’s boiling hot acid. Well, it’s not. It’s water and natural alkaline,” Hughes said. “They have this weird-science, Frankenstein idea in their minds and that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Last year, when Ruth Volk’s 49-year-old daughter died, she decided that cremation was her best option. Her family has a burial plot in Pennsylvania, but 77-year-old Volk lives in Ballwin, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis.
“I really wanted her close to me,” she said. “ In order to do that, I had to have her cremated.”
But Volk didn’t like the connotation of fire. And after looking at videos online, she decided that water cremation was an appropriate choice for her daughter Nicole, who was a swimmer as a teenager.
“I just thought this is kinder and gentler than fire,” she said. “It was more comforting.”
Since her daughter’s cremation, Volk has begun to tell friends and family about the process. She thinks more people would choose alkaline hydrolysis if they knew more about it.
For now, her daughter’s ashes are in a container at home with her. But the box contains two names.
Volk has given Hughes clear instructions for her own death. She wants a water cremation, too. And she expects that her remains will be placed in the container with those of her daughter.
“I just think this is the way to go,” she said. “The only thing that’s not on there is the date of my death.”
