Liquid cremation sounds like an option to having bodies burned in cremation, instead of fire this uses water. Instead of having burned bodies in the air from fires we have dissolved bodies in our water. That is the part I find unsettling. (I still drink tap water - though I'm pretty sure a lot of bottled water isn't from some pristine brook in the back of nowhere). Of course the water will be filtered, just as I hope the air would be in cremations. But, air seems easier to filter than water. Just my thought, I don't know if its true.

Would you choose to be cremated by water? There is more to think about than just the science of it. Still, its something to think about, an option to burning.

our bodies are nothing but bags of live bacteria and dead cells. We can attempt to slow our decay (embalming), or we can preempt it with a destructive blaze (cremation). We can also dissolve our bodies with lye, using an increasingly popular procedure called alkaline hydrolysis.

Alkaline hydrolysis - also known as liquid cremation or water cremation or bio-cremation - one of the cheapest and most environmentally-friendly forms of dealing with a cadaver.

One way to think about it is that alkaline hydrolysis rapidly speeds up the ordinary decay process using heat, pressure, and an alkaline substance such as potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide. The body is put inside a steel vessel with 80 gallons or so of water that is heated up to 300 degrees—killing any microbes and even destroying prions responsible for the human version of mad cow disease. After an hour or two, most of the body dissolved into liquid. The remaining bone is ground up into ash.

With air pollution, lack of space, and carbon emissions making traditional burial methods even more problematic, alkaline hydrolysis is poised to become the method of choice.

Paraphrased from What Is Liquid Cremation and Why Is It Illegal?