AFTER more than a decade of success in persuading citizens to conserve energy and recycle their rubbish, German environmental watchdogs have discovered a new target group the dead.
The Federal Environment Ministry is to issue next month strict new guidelines to undertakers aimed at cleaning up cremation and preventing the dead from polluting the air of the living.
Cremation has become a popular way of death for Germans and almost half of the 900,000 who died in 1995 ended up in an urn rather than a grave.
Out of squeamishness or discretion, green activists have long turned a blind eye to the environmental damage caused by cremation. Besides, many argue, burial is an equally dirty process that risks polluting ground water.
Germany's 120 crematoria pump 140 times more dioxins and furane gas into the air than the law permits from factories. One large crematorium produces more deadly mercury each year than the chemical giant Bayer.
One solution being considered by the Environment Ministry is to treat corpses the same way as household rubbish, which must be emptied into a variety of coloured containers. This would mean removing glass eyes, amalgam tooth fillings, pacemakers, silicon breast implants and artificial limbs before the corpse is put in the oven.
Under pressure from undertakers, who are already so overburdened that most cremations in major cities take place weeks after death, the government is likely to compromise. This would mean removing metal pins and pace makers but allowing tooth fillings and silicon implants to melt during cremation.
However, this will not be enough to reduce emissions significantly and some environmentalists argue that crematoria should fit powerful filters to their ovens.
Undertakers complain that such filters would be ineffective because the only way to cut dioxins is to raise the temperature of the ovens to 850 degrees centigrade. But few want to invest in new equipment, pointing out that such high temperatures are almost unknown in Europe.
Some undertakers already tailor cremations to environmentally conscious mourners, offering "environmental protection coffins" made of cardboard and urns made of bark that are guaranteed to decay quickly. The new guidelines recommend the banning of metal coffin handles and accessories.
The German Foreign Ministry vetoed a plan by Berlin's Environmental Office to ask other European states how they dealt with the problem of clothing for cremations. The diplomats in Bonn felt the memory of the Holocaust made it unacceptable for Germans to inquire abroad about methods of incineration.
. A German woman wanted in connection with a fatal West Berlin nightclub bombing in 1986 which led, to a US air strike on Libya arrived back in Germany yesterday after being extradited from Greece. The suspect, Ms Andrea Hausler (31), was arrested last October in Halkidiki near Salonika at the request of German authorities.
