I’m talking about knee and hip replacements mostly, but also screws holding bones together, gold crowns - anything that won’t burn or melt under high temperatures.
Does the temperature of the oven destroy the alloy? Are they salvaged for scrap? Wrapped up and given to the next of kin? And what sort of monetary value are we talking about for the scrap?
I asked about something similar when my dad was cremated. They said his pacemaker and teeth fillings would be treated as medical waste. I don’t know if the temperatures are high enough to melt any of it.
I thought pacemakers have to be removed before cremation, because they can explode and often contain radioactive material (in the battery)? This does not have to be done by a physician; mortuary personnel can do it.
Hmm, I wonder who profits from the gold in crowns.
I don’t know if they removed it first, but they didn’t give it to me.
Mom always said that she wanted us to remove her crowns before burial or cremation. But I broke a tooth with a gold crown and it had to be pulled. I used one of those “We buy dental gold” envelopes and got nearly $20 for it. I discussed it with my sisters after Mom died and we decided that it wasn’t worth bothering with.
Later, going through her jewelry box, we found three teeth with crowns - all with roots. I have no idea who they originally belonged to. They weren’t hers. Well, they weren’t originally hers. Two of the teeth were joined by a single crown that covered both of them, which we all thought was odd.
By then I had found out that the local coin shop paid the best gold prices in our area. I don’t remember how much we got per crown, but they had no trouble dealing with the teeth. They had a tool that broke the teeth off of the crown. Crown in the dish to be weighed - tooth bits in the wastebasket.
I’m not sure about crowns, but IIRC from the two funeral directors (now that I think about it, I know three), anything artificial is removed before (or sometimes after) cremation. Naturally, you don’t want to burn anything with a battery, but I believe the problem with artificial joints is that they’ll wreck the blender…yeah, the run the cremains through an Osterizer/Food processor type thing before you get them back so you don’t end up with giant chunks of bone.
The mortuary where my dad was cremated asked if I wanted his artificial hip along with the cremains. I told them “no.”
It’s the cremulator. If you’re interested in what goes on in a crematory, read Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.
When my dad was cremated, the wire used to hold his sternum together after open heart surgery were still intact and present in the cremains.
I just love Caitlin Doughty! I’ve read all of her books, and follow her You Tube channel, “Ask A Mortician.”
There’s a Columbo episode, Ashes to Ashes with Patrick McGoohan as the murderer, where this bocomes the key element in the final gotcha.
For some reason, I read that first part as “my dad was cremated once”.
Well, yeah, you only get the one time.
Many years ago this question had piqued my curiosity enough that I wrote this piece of information down when I came across it: “Between 2006 and mid-2009, Denmark’s 31 crematoria earned 77,762 Danish kroner (DKK) by selling 4,810 kg of scrap metal to a Dutch recycling company.” Source: The Economist, 8. August 2009, page 25 (the link is not to the original source which would be behind a paywall anyway but to the page where I published this reference in German. Otherwise I would no longer have found it, but Google helped).