When a company asks permission to pulverize a corpse\u2014to freeze a body solid, then shake it till it shatters\u2014how, exactly, should the government respond? Last September, Derek Schmidt, the attorney general for Kansas, sat down to ponder the specifics. Interest in a new process for disposing of the dead had trickled across the state; it was up to Schmidt to say whether the technology was even legal.<\/p>\n
Schmidt\u2019s analysis began on YouTube, where he landed on an animated demonstration that broke down the new mortuary method, known as promession, into steps: First, cadavers are cryogenically frozen; then they\u2019re vibrated into bits, freeze-dried to get the moisture out, and filtered into an urn. In theory, promession would release significantly fewer emissions than fire cremation, which is responsible for 270,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year. If true, that would make promession a big draw for the environmentally conscious. Schmidt cross-referenced each step in the promession process against Kansas law in the hopes of answering what turns out to be a highly consequential question: Is vibration into bits a type of cremation, and therefore a legal form of disposition?<\/p>\n
Two months later, Schmidt issued his decision. Promession, he announced, \u201cwould not meet the requirements of a cremation process as set forth\u201d in state law. His reasoning reads a bit like science fiction and a bit like a rabbi\u2019s parsing of biblical law. Schmidt argued, for instance, that cremation requires \u201cthe separation of flesh from bone by the destruction of the flesh.\u201d Promession certainly could be said to destroy the flesh, but the crystallization process doesn\u2019t really separate it from the bone. In that sense, Schmidt concluded that Kansas could not treat it as cremation.<\/p>\n
Schimdt\u2019s predicament is not unique. In the last few years, state officials across the country have been forced to map a range of futuristic death technologies onto the creaky regulations of a prior age. Most state disposition laws are antiquated, premised on narrow definitions of \u201ccremation\u201d and \u201cburial\u201d that leave new technologies like promession without the legal grounds to establish themselves. But a few states\u2014Kansas among them\u2014have seized the opportunity. In a bid to attract death-tech companies, and perhaps a piece of the $2 billion fire cremation industry, they\u2019ve been revamping regulations.<\/p>\n