A Crematorium may seem like a place of horror and death but actually it is a really interesting place. I have been brought up with death and have learned to respect it, I consider myself to be very lucky in this respect because incidentally my uncle was a funeral director but he now works as a crematorium manager. Anyway, the deceased body is brought into the crematorium by people called bearers and placed on a plynth with rollers on it called a catafalque, this usually has curtains around it and depending upon religious beliefs the coffin lid may or it may not be open for the friends and relatives to observe the body before it is cremated.

After the religious official has said a prayer and the family's arrangements are done the official presses a button and either the curtains closes or the body is moved by conveyor belt into position for cremation. The crematorium staff will open two wooden hatches and the coffin will be pulled along sets of rollers. Then a special battery powered or manual 'charge trolley' will collect the coffin, this usually is either hydraulic or it had scissor action lifts on it but these aren't as common in the better funded crematoriums however they still use these in case of an overflow.

The cremator, the furnace in which the cremation actually takes place, is heated up to 1000 degrees celcius and the coffin is pushed in where in 90 minutes time the cremation is complete. Remains will contain nails and calcium deposits, bones, prosthetic implants. The wood ignites first and then the organic materials burn away. The body sometimes sits up due to the heat reacting with the structure of the body.

The cremated remains are then left to cool in a fan assisted box before they are crushed by a cremulator which has lead balls in it.

The remains are then put into an ashes transfer cabinet and put into a plastic or family selected urn. The ashes are scattered by the crematorium staff if requested or if there are no next of kin. The family may opt to receive the ashes.

Extra Info:

For the Greens in the crowd, the energy use by a crematorium may seem to be wasteful, but is offset by reducing the amount of land needed to be dedicated to burial vaults. Some locations have been taking steps to recover the heat for more useful purposes (See link) .

Regarding pollution, the crematoriums use air pollution systems to burn any odours from off gases and remove ash and particulate before discharge. Burial on the other hand (According to "Standard Methods for the Examination of Water and Wastewater") may pose a significant groundwater pollution risk and at any rate involves the dedicated use of cemetery land.

Other fine points:

• No clergy are required.
• No family are required. Here in Calgary one site offers a no frills pick up and disposal service.
• During the burning process the corpse is often prodded with rods to ensure rapid and complete burning - just like a campfire log.

Answer:

I don't want to offend anyone who has taken their time to write an answer on here so I will provide my own answer rather than make alterations to someone else's. I am in the process of applying for a job at a Crematorium and came across a few of the answer sites while trying to check up some facts about the job on Google; In short, I have never read so much nonsense about one subject as I did while searching; I was fortunate enough to spend a day at a Crematorium in London where I met a wonderful group of staff, all of whom were quite happy to explain everything to me and show me how the whole process works. I am in the UK so the process I will describe relates to cremation in the UK (some countries vary the process, although I imagine it is essentially the same basic process anywhere in the world).

When the Funeral Directors arrive at the Crematorium, they hand a number of documents to the Crematorium staff (usually a service co-ordinator) which include the permission to cremate the deceased (on behalf of the family) and a copy of the death certificate. The coffin in brought into the crematorium on a low trolley, or carried in by friends (usually called Pall-bearers) and placed on a plinth called a Catafalque (pronounced CAT-a-falk).

A short service is usually held, depending on the wishes of the family and the particular religion practiced by the deceased, then the service usually ends with some music. At this stage, one of two things will happens . . . most usually, curtains will close in front of the coffin. If there are no curtains, you may see the coffin roll along the catafalque and usually through a small doorway to an adjacent room. If the catafalque does not work automatically, the coffin will be taken off by crematorium staff, usually behind the curtains to avoid distress to the family and friends.

Note that if the catafalque does roll the coffin through a small doorway IT IS NOT rolling it into the cremator so don't expect flames to come shooting through the doorway as the coffin goes through. The coffin is either placed straight onto a trolley (sometimes called a charger) or placed in a lift, sent down to a lower level and then placed onto the charger.

It is now in the hands of the cremation technicians. They check that the name on the lid of the coffin matches that on the paperwork (this must be the name of the deceased and must match exactly (there are no titles on the coffin lid e.g. Lord John Smith). If the name on the coffin matches the name on the paperwork, the cremation can continue.

The charger is taken to the cremator which will be switched off at this stage - once the crematorium is running, the cremator holds the heat from the previous cremation. When the coffin is loaded into the cremator, the temperature is usually around 700 Degrees and is hot enough to begin cremating the coffin and the deceased. After about 45 minutes, most of the coffin has burnt and the body has begun to burn, the cremator is switched on and gas fired flames raise the temperature inside the cremator to around 1400 Degrees. It takes approximately another 45 minutes to cremate the rest of the body.

To ensure the final remains are those of a particular person, a name label is placed into a holder on the front of the cremator (like a label on a filing cabinet) showing the name of the person being cremated.

Once the body and coffin have been cremated, the cremator is turned off and a sliding trap door is pulled out allowing the remains to drop into a chamber below. Crematorium technicians use a 'paddle' to ensure all the ashes pass through to the chamber below and then take the name label and put it into a holder on front of the chamber now containing the ashes.

The ashes are allowed to cool and contain enough heat to finish the cremating process without adding further heat. The sliding trap door in the bottom of the cremator is then closed and ready for the next cremation.

Meanwhile, the ashes that are now cooling are dropped through a trapdoor in the bottom of the second chamber into a cooling tray and the name label is transferred with the ashes and placed into the holder on the front of the third (bottom) chamber.

The process thus far is repeated for each cremation and the cremator when fully loaded has three bodies at various stages of cremation. The next step is to take the ashes from the bottom chamber in the container into which they have fallen, and with the name label slotted into a holder on the front of the container, to a machine called a 'Cremulator'.

In short, a cremulator looks a little like a tumble dryer and the burnt remains are placed into the cremulator (at this stage, some of the remains are still fairly large, like body joints and bigger bones that have not yet been reduced to ash) so three or four steel balls (each about the size of a tennis ball) are place in the cremulator with the remains. The cremulator tumbles round, like a tumble dryer, and the steel balls gradually break up the remains into ashes.

As the ashes gradually disintegrate, they fall through the holes inside the drum of the cremulator into a container in the base. The name label is transferred to a holder on the front of the cremulator and stays there until all the ashes are broken down. The final consistency has a texture similar to coffee granules and the process is complete.

In the final stage, a magnet is passed over the cold ashes to remove any ferrous metals (small screws from the coffin lid and nameplate) and visually checked for non-magnetic metal remains which are also removed.

It is worth pointing out that many of the coffin fittings are 'crematable' so in most cases there is little metal left at the end of the process. All metal left over at the end of a cremation is collected and buried on crematorium grounds.

Finally, the cold ashes are placed into an urn or a plastic container and made ready for the family to collect. The Crematorium will scatter the ashes if asked to do so by the family, but some families have specific places where they would like to do the scattering themselves. The choice rests with the family and the process is complete.

Before finishing, it might be worth dispelling a few myths . . .

• The body is not taken out of the coffin and the coffin resold.
• The crematorium technicians do not open the coffin looking for valuables.
• Ashes don't end up in a big pile and each family given a mixture of other people's ashes.
• The ashes are not topped off with extra burnt wood.

In summary, I found the visit informative and the staff extremely professional. The general consensus among the people I spoke with is that one day, they may be cremated and treat their clients (deaceased or not) in the way they expect to be treated when their time comes.

Crematoriums are well regulated, both economically and from the point of environmental friendliness. For the most part, you can visit a crematorium and, from the outside, you wouldn't realise what was going on inside. There are no chimneys belching out tons of smoke; indeed the regulations assure that noxious emissions are properly controlled.

Some opinions from the community

• Speaking as a Catholic cremation is now accepted however if the deceased has requested a burial mass in the church the body must be brought to the church for the mass and then cremation may be done after that mass has taken place the ashes of the deceased must be buried in a cemetery and not strewn, lets say, on a beach or on the ocean...

• The Eastern Orthodox Church does not allow cremation. The Church from the earliest times practiced burial of the dead, as the Roman catacombs reveal. Christ resurrected the bodies of many people during His ministry on earth (such as Lazarus) and His disciples also performed many miracles and even resurrected the dead (Acts 9:36-41). So the Church views cremation as a mockery of Christ and His Apostles who resurrected human bodies, not ashes. During the great earthquake that happened immediately after Christ's death on the Cross, the graves opened up and the bodies of the saints were raised from the dead (Matthew 27:51-54). Cremation has also been the custom of most atheists and the pagan religions, which do not believe in resurrection, and that is another reason why the Christian Church has always been against it.

Answer2: The Scriptures do not present any basic objection to the practice of cremation.

There are Biblical accounts relating that the bodies or bones of dead people were burned. (Josh. 7:25; 2 Chron. 34:4, 5) We can see this from the account of the death of King Saul and his three sons. The four of them died battling the Philistines. One of the sons was Jonathan, the good friend and loyal supporter of David. When valiant Israelites living in Jabesh-gilead learned what had happened, they recovered the four bodies, burned them, and then buried the bones. David later praised those Israelites for their actions.

The Scriptural hope for the dead is the resurrection-God's restoration of the person to life. Whether a dead person is cremated or not, Jehovah is not limited in his ability to restore the person to life with a new body. The three faithful Hebrews who faced death in a fiery furnace as ordered by King Nebuchadnezzar did not need to fear that if they were thus destroyed, God could not resurrect them. (Dan. 3:16-18) That was also true of faithful servants of Jehovah who faced death and subsequent cremation in Nazi concentration camps. Various loyal servants of God have perished in explosions or in other ways that left no trace of their remains. Still, their resurrection is assured.-Rev. 20:13. Jehovah does not have to reassemble a person's former body in order to resurrect him. That is shown by God's resurrecting anointed Christians to heavenly life. Like Jesus, who was "made alive in the spirit," anointed Christians are resurrected as the same person but with a spiritual body. No part of their former physical body accompanies them to heaven.-1 Pet. 3:18; 1 Cor. 15:42-53; 1 John 3:2.

Our hope in the resurrection rests, not on what might be done with the physical corpse, but on faith in God's ability and desire to fulfill his promises. (Acts 24:15) Granted, we may not fully comprehend how God has performed the miracle of resurrection on past occasions or how he will do so in the future. Still, we put our trust in Jehovah. He has provided "a guarantee" by resurrecting Jesus.-Acts 17:31; Luke 24:2, 3.

Christians do well to take into consideration social norms, local sentiments, and legal requirements regarding the disposition of dead bodies. (2 Cor. 6:3, 4) Then, whether the body of a deceased person is to be cremated or not is a personal or family decision. Watchtower magazine 6/15/2014