TWEED Shire councillors have received an urgent plea to consider an alternative to a new crematorium to reduce the creation of greenhouse gases.

Aquamation Industries, which has pioneered a special water-based process, has sent a letter to councillors and senior staff asking for consideration of its alternative before the council votes, possibly this month, on building a $420,000 crematorium at its Tweed Valley Cemetery at Eviron, halfway between Tweed Heads and Murwillumbah.

The company argues aquamation is more environmentally friendly and the council could have the only aquamation centre in the region rather than competing with other crematoria.

"If they put one of ours in, it would be the only one in the area," the company's general manager Max Dumais told The Daily News.

"You've got five different crematoria in the Gold Coast and Tweed."

Mr Dumais said providing the new facility at the Tweed Valley Cemetery was an opportunity for the council to pick up on something environmentally sustainable.

An Australian survey had found "68% of people when presented with this as an alternative chose this over only 16% for cremation and 16% for burial", he said.

Mr Dumais said aquamation was originally developed to "deal with the pathogens and prions involved in mad cow disease", but the version developed from Australia "is a low pressure, low temperature approach which avoids some of the inherent dangers in its high pressure and high temperature antecedents".

"Obviously, this process is likely to have a more sympathetic hearing where the council is predisposed to environmental issues and climate change," he said.

"In the case of aquamation, if it were to replace cremation in Australia you would be looking to save around 37,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas based on 2009 figures alone."

In his letter to councillors Mr Dumois wrote the installation of a new crematorium could raise a number of environmental and financial concerns.

"From an environmental perspective, aquamation is a water-based alternative to cremation which removes the cost involved in incinerating a coffin, eliminates the pollution of vaporised mercury and toxic and carcinogenic gas into the atmosphere and will avoid the 200-400kg of greenhouse gas going into the atmosphere from each cremation," he added.

"Aquamation has the potential to place Tweed Shire Council as one of the front-runners in the world and an exemplar in moving to this sustainable and environmentally friendly solution.

How it works

• Aquamation uses water instead of fire to return a body to nature.
• The decomposition process taking place is called alkaline hydrolysis.
• With aquamation, an individual body is placed in a stainless steel vessel. A combination of flowing water, temperature and alkalinity are used to accelerate the natural course of tissue hydrolysis.
• At the end of this process, the body has dissolved in the water. The only solid remains are the bones, as per a cremation.