News from Funeral Service Insider (www.funeralserviceinsider.com).
Matthews International announced in a news release that it’s developed a new Bio Cremation® unit for the North American market.
The new cremator uses a water-based alkaline hydrolysis process and features enhancements to improve performance, consistency, reliability and cost.
“We’ve been looking forward to these enhancements for a long time,” says Steve Schaal, president of Matthews Cremation, North America. “The first-generation unit proved that AH could be done at all. Now with this second-generation unit we’re proving that it can be done better, and at a substantially lower cost.”
The new Bio Cremation® unit offers improved performance and consistency. It also offers a substantially lower cost than the first design – as much as 40 percent in some configurations. “The lower cost was an important goal for us,” says Schaal. “It makes Bio Cremation® feasible for many more crematories, without sacrificing the extra safety and protection of high pressure/high temperature processing.” The second-generation design was developed under a new partnership between Matthews and BioSafe Life Sciences, a U.S.-based company that builds alkaline hydrolysis equipment exclusively and holds a number of patents for the technology. BioSafe and Matthews have been working together to develop this new design for the cremation market around the globe.
“Having a domestic partner with a national service presence makes it easier to deliver the performance, reliability and service that Matthews customers expect,” Schaal says. “When we couple those with improvements in pricing, we expect it to be a powerful combination.”
“Our first design was developed by Resomation, Ltd., a Scottish company that deserves a lot of credit for their historical work pioneering some of the early AH ideas. The industry owes them a debt of gratitude for the role they played in helping to bring some of these early concepts to the market,” Schaal says. Matthews had a distribution agreement with Resomation, Ltd. that ended earlier this year.