The recycling warehouse looks unremarkable. Workers sift through dusty containers of screws, rods and iron balls and sort them for processing.
From the jumble it’s hard to tell they were once prosthetic hips, artificial knees and metal implants of all sorts, salvaged from the ashes of crematoria.
If recycling grandma’s replacement parts seems a grisly business, it is in fact a blessing for funeral homes, for the environment and for families who know that the implants that made their loved ones more comfortable are not being discarded in the trash.
When relatives are asked, virtually no one objects that the ashes are sifted for reusable metals, said Ruud Verberne, director of OrthoMetals, which recovers 200 tonnes of valuable metals a year from funeral parlors.
OrthoMetals sends its trucks to collect metals from 450 crematoria in 15 European countries at no charge. At its warehouse in Zwolle, Netherlands, 115km east of Amsterdam, it sorts the metals into crates of iron, titanium, stainless steel and cobalt chromium, and sells them to scrap dealers at the going market rate.
After deducting costs, including transportation and the salaries for six workers, the proceeds are returned to the crematoria or to national burial associations, to be donated to charities of their choice, Verberne said. Usually the funds go to cancer societies, research institutions or any other medical facilities.
“We never had the idea of doing this in a commercial way,” he said at his scrap metal factory. “It’s a very sensitive thing. You are collecting metals that were in the body of a deceased person. It doesn’t belong to us.”
Any thought of personal profit also is discouraged by legal uncertainties: Who actually owns the salvaged material — the family, the crematorium or the national health service that might have provided the implants for free?
Margins are small. A new hip costs the patient at least 2,000 euros (US$2,700) before surgery, but it has a scrap value of about 3 euros.
Not only imperishable body parts are recoverable from the ashes. People are cremated wearing glasses, watches and rings, and with coins in their pockets. Sometimes the steel tips of workmen’s shoes glint in the pile of remains.
Precious metals, such as gold, silver or platinum are recovered by the crematoria and offered to the family or placed in the urn. Items like pacemakers that run on batteries are removed from the corpse before cremation.
Coffins are stripped of gold-plated crucifixes, handles and ornaments before they go into the 900°C oven and collected by the recycler for melting down.
None of implants is reused, even if in perfect condition, out of respect for the dead, Verberne said.
The company also receives crates of unsold and obsolete implants from manufacturers, still in their boxes.
Though unusual, OrthoMetals provides a service for a swiftly growing industry. Burial ground is becoming increasingly scarce and expensive, and most families know that unless high maintenance costs are paid, cemeteries often will remove coffins after 20 years and rebury bodies in common graves.
That makes cremation, with smaller plots for urns than for coffins, an option that more families are choosing.
In the Netherlands, a country with a strong Calvinist tradition where church burials used to be the rule, 55 percent of the dead are now cremated, and that figure is rising. In Japan, nearly everyone is cremated.
The Kranenburg cemetery in Zwolle, about 10 minutes from the warehouse, is a peaceful wooded ground with subtle graves. Among the stones along the path to the crematorium is one bearing the epitaph, “His glass is empty, His cigar is out.” Behind the building, large green bins of discarded implants are full and awaiting collection.
“About 20 years ago we were just putting those things in the garbage and now we see that these materials could be used,” director Bert Holthof said. “And moreover, there is a good business solution for that.”
Holthof said about one-third of the 1,000 cremations his funeral home conducts each year yields salvageable metals.
OrthoMetals also has collection centers in the US, Canada and Australia. Rather than collecting by truck, the crematoria pack recyclable metals into boxes and send them by courier.
The company began in 1997 when Verberne, who was already in the recycling business, met Jan Gabriels, an orthopedic surgeon who was dealing with a hip problem of Verberne’s one-year-old daughter. Gabriels had given an 84-year-old patient a new hip just a few weeks before the old woman died.
The two men pondered that her prosthesis likely was destined for a landfill or to be buried uselessly on cemetery grounds. Verberne said they decided to set up a partnership to “do something worthwhile with the metals.”
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese