City Officials Warm to the Idea of Using Heat from Crematorium
Officials in Halmstad, a town of about 55,000 residents in Western Sweden, have cooked up a plan to use the energy generated by ovens at the local crematorium to heat all of the cemetery’s facilities. If that goes well, Halmstad city officials plan to start tapping into the new energy supply by 2010 to heat local homes, businesses, and other buildings around town.
Need for New Crematorium Ovens Inspires Innovative Energy Plan
The idea started to percolate after an environmental review concluded that the crematorium’s chimneys were releasing too much smoke into the air, and inspectors said that the crematorium would have to purchase new ovens to meet current environmental standards and reduce air pollution. Once cemetery officials started thinking about environmental issues associated with the crematorium, they realized that a lot of potentially useful energy was going up in smoke.
Using Crematorium Heat Saves Money Two Ways
In addition to lowering the cemetery’s heating bill, feeding energy from the ovens into the public heating system will also save the crematorium money in other ways.
When a body is cremated, a variety of toxic materials are released from the corpse and must be filtered out before those emissions can be released into the air. The necessary filtering is accomplished by cooling the smoke from around 1,000 degrees centigrade to 150 degrees centigrade. Circulating those emissions through the public heating system will cool the smoke to very near the target temperature, and the crematorium will spend much less money on cooling and filtering.
