Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Your funeral marks your last carbon footprint. But an enterprising Swedish biologist has developed what she claims to be an ecologically sensitive departure from Earth. The corpse is freeze-dried, pulverised, buried in a potato jacket and allowed to turn quickly into compost.

Susanne Wiigh-Maesak, the 51-year-old inventor of the scheme, has won the support of the Lutheran Church, which has taken a 5 per cent stake in her company, and the Swedish Government.

“I would like to push for the issue of freeze-drying,” said Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth, the Culture Minister, in a recent interview. She regards it as an environmentally friendly alternative to cremation, with its belching dioxin and mercury emissions, and six-feet-under burial that makes for very slow decay and often poisons underground watercourses. But neither Ms Wiigh-Maesak nor the minister had counted on the bureaucratic opposition to an idea that could shake up the way that we think about death.

The prototype corpse freeze-dryer, a so-called Promotorium, was supposed to be up and running by now in the town of Jönköping, ready to show the world the reality of carbon-neutral burial. About a hundred of the machines have been ordered by South Korea, while Britain, South Africa and a number of US cities have shown interest in the process. Ten corpses, including two relatives of Ms Wiigh-Maesak, await pulverisation in Jönköping.

But local authorities insist that the corpses must be buried in the conventional way. There is no way of knowing how much longer it will take for the final authorisation of freeze-drying and the corpses have been in the freezer for six years, longer than the law allows.

Ms Wiigh-Maesak is upset: “I think one has to respect the last wishes of the deceased and they quite explicitly wanted to be treated in this way.”

The reservations about the kind of burial are that traces of the liquid nitrogen used in the freezing could linger in the earth along with other possibly harmful substances. Since the remains will be buried less than 70cm (28in) from the surface, rather than the standard two metres, the soil will have to be examined.

Ms Wiigh-Maesak emphasised that her method was far kinder to the environment than the alternatives. “If we are burnt or buried we end up, with all our body toxins, in the atmosphere or the water,” she said.

There are five stages to the so-called promession process. First, the body is frozen. Then it is dropped into a liquid nitrogen bath, which cools it to a temperature of minus 192C (-314F). The water in the body dries up and the corpse becomes as brittle as glass. Thirdly, the body is placed in a vibrator, which quickly reduces it to a pile of pink-beige powder. Fourthly, a magnet is run over the remains to remove metal traces from fillings or pacemakers. Finally, the powder is put into a biodegradable pouch made of starch, such as potato, and buried.

Between six months and a year later, the body has become mulch. Ms Wiigh-Maesak would like her remains to fertilise a white rhododendron bush.

Crematoriums are now obliged, under European law, to install new filters to reduce air pollution. For smaller institutions freeze-drying could be an economical alternative. First, however, the Jönköping corpses have to be turned to powder to demonstrate that the Swedish technology really can work.

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