How would you like to know that the heat you’re enjoying in your home came from burning bodies? We’re not talking about starting a funeral pyre in your living room (that would be, uh, illegal, among other things). But, if the rest of the world uses the Swedish town of Halmsted as an example, we could be kept warm with heat recycled from crematoriums.
From Treehugger:
“It was when we were discussing all these environmental issues that we started thinking about the energy that is used in the cremations and realised that instead of all that heat just going up into the air, we could make use of it somehow. It was just rising into the skies for nothing,” said Lennart Andersson, the director of the cemetery in the town of Halmstad.
Because cremation of human remains can release toxins, like mercury from dental fillings, the filtration of the off-gases is extremely important. In order to effectively clean the emitted gases, they must be cooled from around 1000°C to under 150°C. Recovery of this heat for warming first the crematorium buildings and later to feed the public heating system will save costs and use less water as well.
This is a very interesting concept. After all, as Andersson said, that heat is wasted while people across the world are paying out the nose for fossil fuel heat. Using this sort of ‘byproduct energy’ only makes sense, and if we thought this way about everything, we could undoubtedly uncover thousands of creative ways to recycle and save energy.
Link [Treehugger]
Photo credit: Hub Pages
