Francisco Rivero proudly shows off a large stainless steel pod in the middle of a cavernous concrete room. He unlatches its heavy vault door, swinging it open slowly to reveal an inner chamber just large enough for a person to lie inside.
Rivero is a funeral director at Pacific Interment Service in Emeryville, and the futuristic machine is an aquamation system. It uses water to dissolve every part of the human body except for the bones and teeth — a process also called alkaline hydrolysis.
“It just flows the water back and forth over the person, back and forth,” says Rivero in hypnotic tones. “You come in water, you’re leaving in water. It’s like an unbirthing.”
Rivero founded Pacific Interment in 1992, specializing in cremation at a time when the process was not widely used. In December of 2023, he installed his aquamation system, becoming the first to offer the service in the Bay Area and one of only four aquamation providers in California. He is convinced aquamation is the future of the funeral industry, and is on a mission to spread the word about a gentler, environmentally friendly alternative to cremation.
Though it has only been available to funeral homes in California since 2022, the concept of cremation by water actually stretches back to the 19th century. A pioneering version of the process was patented by Amos Herbert Hobson, a British farmer who had immigrated to the U.S., in 1888 as a way to turn animal carcasses into plant food to keep them from polluting the environment and spreading disease. The modern-day take on an alkaline hydrolysis system for human cadavers arrived in 2005 when one was installed at the Mayo Clinic.
In the aquamation process, the body is placed inside the machine, and the sealed chamber partially fills with a mixture of water and sodium hydroxide. The solution is then heated to 303 degrees Fahrenheit and circulated over the body, quietly breaking down its soft tissues, along with any bacteria and viruses. The machine sounds like a “small brook” when operating, Rivero says.
After three hours, all that remains is a pristine skeleton and a yellowish liquid that is safe to empty straight into the sewer.
“Technically, that water is clean enough that you could drink it,” Rivero says.
Bones and teeth are then ground into a fine, ivory powder and returned to the deceased’s family — much like the remains from cremation, without the ashen hue.
Rivero emigrated from Cuba in 1975, where his family had performed funerals since at least the 19th century. Because limited space there makes burials a challenge, the traditional Cuban practice is to bury the deceased for six to eight months and then to exhume and inter the remaining bones, Rivero says.
He sees a connection between this practice and aquamation, as both involve the recovery of bones after the rest of the body dissolves.
1 of 15
Across the room are Rivero’s two hulking cremation furnaces, which look like relics compared to the aquamation system’s shining assemblage of tubes, knobs and computer fans.
Rivero has carried out some 30,000 cremations over the past three decades. Thinking about the environmental impact of that many incinerations gives him “heartburn,” he says. Not only does each cremation use a lot of energy in the form of natural gas, but toxic mercury vapor also gets liberated from old-style amalgam tooth fillings.
Rivero’s son Lazaro, who will one day take over the family business, introduced his father to the environmental benefits of aquamation a couple of years back.
“He was like, ‘Hey man, you know, we can make up for some of these 30,000 cremations’,” Rivero says.
Rivero’s aquamation unit uses 90 per cent less energy than cremation, according to Joe Wilson, founder and CEO of Bio-Response Solutions, which manufactured the machine.
Beyond the environmental benefits, there’s another reason why Rivero has become an evangelist for aquamation—he sees it as inherently less violent than cremation.
When Rivero’s time comes, his son will be the one to handle the disposition of his body. Years earlier, when the grim topic first came up, Rivero was adamant that he wanted to be cremated. But Lazaro had trouble with the idea of putting his father’s body through that ordeal.
“You have to open the machine every 30 minutes or so, to reposition people,” Lazaro says. “And you’re just seeing people in various states of being burned away. It’s hard to picture your loved ones in there.”
Rivero understood his son’s trepidation, having experienced the trauma of cremating his own father nearly 20 years earlier. “I felt the pain of incinerating him. You know, it really struck deep at me,” he recalls.
During the first aquamation Rivero and Lazaro performed, they heard the water gurgling gently through the metal walls and saw the nearly undisturbed, ivory white bones that remained—and immediately felt they had found a better solution.
“It’s almost like I bought the machine for myself,” Rivero says.
Having invested $425,000 in the machine, Rivero is now trying to spread the word about the benefits of choosing aquamation over cremation. So far, he has conducted just 26 aquamations.
The process is still little-known, and it is also polarizing; the Catholic Church currently advises against the method, saying it leaves nothing for bodily resurrection. However, aquamation yields more skeletal remains than cremation—which the church does permit.
But Rivero sees echoes of the early days of his cremation-driven business, and is convinced aquamation will take off. When Pacific Interment first opened, cremations accounted for just 19 percent of all body dispositions in the United States, according to the Cremation Association of North America. Back then, more seasoned funeral directors had warned Rivero against specializing in the process. But by 2020, cremations accounted for more than half of dispositions.
Rivero is betting that public opinion of aquamation will similarly shift in the coming years, and that the process will overtake cremation.
His enthusiasm for the process stood out to Jan Coulter when she and her husband went to see the machine in July. Coulter’s 91-year-old aunt had just passed away at her home in Walnut Creek. The first thing Coulter’s mother said after hearing about her gardening-loving sister’s passing was that they should find the greenest disposition method possible.
During that visit, Coulter and her husband became converts. Along with the environmental benefits, Coulter felt less unsettled knowing her aunt’s body would not be burnt.
“I just loved it when he said it’s like we come into this world in water,” she says, echoing Rivero’s refrain.
Coulter and her husband both decided to be aquamated when their time comes. She also began enthusiastically telling friends about the process.
“I just thought it was such a sane way to deal with someone’s body after they passed,” she says.
Originally Published: