I concur with other thoughts thus far and would provide another --
we're dealing with a couple of very distinct outcomes here -- a
crematorium intends to create an ash "outcome", as it were, for
delivery back to a relative or to a burial / interment location.
Burning paper means you want to completely destroy what is there beyond
any opportunity for reconstruction, but a mass of paper is going to
take a fair amount of energy to completely reduce to ash, with nothing
readable -- as well as a good containment system to keep all of the
unburned material contained in the firebox. We don't want the "outcome"
back. But ash will remain and we'll then have to dispose of that. And
the ash remaining after burning paper is very high proportionally to
the original volume of material.

My understanding is that the cremation process pretty much reduces the
human body and related container to sterile ash and there isn't a
particular problem with that ash flying out the chimney -- keep in mind
that the human body is mostly water, so a lot of what happens is just
boiling out the water, then burning the remaining matter (which also
means that there is a very low volume of material remaining in
comparison to the original volume of matter).

My experience in burning paper (from several years during high school
cleaning classrooms and burning the trash in an incinerator) is that
paper doesn't always burn completely -- certainly a crematorium will do
a better job of it than a garbage burner, but there is risk of the job
not being completely done -- which means the neighborhood might start
finding partially burned documents floating out of the sky -- or Aunt
Edna will find part of a check mixed in with Uncle Harry.

Another consideration is the potential for biohazard issues. While I
expect that most crematoriums work very effectively and create a
sterile outcome, as well as sterilize the contents of the firebox, I'm
not sure how a landfill (or the waste hauler) might look at the paper
ash if there is a chance that small bits of Uncle Harry are mixed in
there -- and I further expect that most crematorium operators would be
offended by the prospect of being asked to do what is essetially
garbage disposal in a place that they try to treat with some dignity.
And you also have the issue of how a relative would feel if they knew
that the crematorium had a couple purposes -- so how do they know that
they got Uncle Harry back and not "Paid Invoices, 1988-89"?

Patrick Cunningham, CRM

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