It seems there isn’t a business sector or segment of our lives that technology doesn’t touch.
For instance, there’s EdTech, or education technology; FinTech or financial services technology; AgriTech, or agricultural technology; and MedTech or medical technology to name a few.
But a Danville company is fast becoming a global leader in a sector, DeathTech, that gets decidedly less press.
The 20 or so employees at Bio-Response Solutions are designing and manufacturing fascinating – albeit somewhat macabre – high-tech machines that company officials say essentially provides a more energy efficient and environmentally friendly way to reduce the remains of a dead animal or person to a pile of dust than traditional incineration or cremation.
Tucked away in a quiet industrial park about 30 miles west of Indianapolis, Bio-Response Solutions is a leading manufacturer of alkaline hydrolysis equipment worldwide.
To be clear, Bio-Response is not competing with funeral homes. In fact, it can’t legally process human bodies. But it does use deceased animals to show potential buyers how the equipment works. And a growing number of funeral homes – as well as research facilities and even farmers – are using its technology.
The process Bio-Response machines use to speed up the decomposition process is called alkaline hydrolysis – which is really just a matter of simple chemistry. Of course, the process is a bit more detailed and complicated than that.
To make it a little less hair-raising, the process is often euphemistically called aquamation or resomation.
Bio-Response’s machines look like large silver tubes. They can fit several small- to medium-sized animals at a time, with air-tight partitions separating the animals to keep the remains separate. With larger animals – and people – they go in one at a time. The machine, company officials say, is surprisingly quiet, and for a larger animal or person, the process can take up to 18 hours.
Bio-Response was founded in November 2009 as the brainchild of Joe Wilson, who had previously worked in waste management for STERIS, a medical equipment company that focuses on infection prevention.
The process being perfected by Bio-Response was started in response to researchers’ need to dispose of lab rats and other contaminated dead research animals.
Through a seminar on the process, “I learned that not only did alkaline hydrolysis dissolve tissue, but it destroyed cancer drugs, embalming agents, formaldehyde, other complex chemical toxins and was sterile,” Wilson says. “The whole idea just caught me off guard.”
It was a way to sanctify the dead without burning them, he notes.
Being a practical Hoosier, Wilson immediately saw applications to this new technology for Indiana – and other – farms.
Wanting to make the method useful to more professions and industries, he built a towable alkaline hydrolysis unit that could be transported to farms for the disposal of diseased livestock. That invention, he reports, was quickly in demand.
Wilson also sought to build a less expensive machine that could handle bigger animals – and people. A Scotland-based company had developed such a unit, but it was very expensive, he relates. Interest in aquamation has been rising across the UK since Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died in 2021, chose the process for his remains.
“Other people had a Rolls Royce,” Wilson observes. “I wanted to build a Chevrolet for the industry.”
Wilson says there’s been growing demand for his larger, less expensive unit. It’s now legal in about half of all U.S. states to use alkaline hydrolysis on human bodies, which is adding to demand. Indiana isn’t yet one of those states.
The company custom makes machines for almost any sized organism and sells them worldwide. Shipping about 100 units – for animals and people combined – each year, Wilson says Bio-Response is now the world’s biggest maker of such machines globally.
Anthony Schoettle is the director of communications for the Indiana Chamber. He started with the Chamber in 2021 after a long career in journalism. He’s won multiple awards for his storytelling ability on a wide range of business topics.
