Urban legend or true story

This is something I was recently asking myself and I wonder if that's a true story or just an urban legend. It is not something I really like to deal with, but are the crematories selling the old metal implants they find among the ashes? IMHO, I prefer that they go in the scrap metal lane instead of being cleaned and reused on someone else's body, but have you ever had any experience with them?

Originally Posted by alloy2

Why so squeamish abut a few recycled parts, when I was younger had four compound fractures after six months in a cast one fracture would not knit and required a bone graft. I was given the option of cadaver donor or using my using own bone.

I opted for my own and they had removed the bone was removed from my right side hip bone during surgery, spent another six months with a cast on my leg.

As fro recycling metal parts from a cremation I would ask fro a discount.

I am not squeamish. My mom had a cornea graft from a deceased donor and I used to carry the eye transplants, bags of blood, urns back from the out-of-town crematoria and frozen bovine semen among others that were shipped as bus packages when I was working at the bus depot. I just dislike the idea that they refurbish and clean up the burned implants and resell them to new "customers", but I doubt that they do that (at least here in Canada and U.S.). What am I most curious about is you have dealt, seen or heard about the metal "left overs" going to the yard. I am sure that no one will ever see a hearse dumping stuff on the shred heap, but Greytruck partially answered my question when he mentioned that they throw the casket steel hand rails for scrap. I guess that the implants must follow some kind of a similar route.

Thanks. I knew that Caitlin Doughty answers some question in her mortician videos on Youtube, but not that Kari. I'll watch that.

Originally Posted by aurum

Not an urban legend. Here from a Canadian refiner's website:

"Specializing in processing high value crematorium material, with the highest recoveries in North America, we are processing experts, from dental scrap to IT equipment and more."

No, they won't resell implants, but the metals are definitely recovered.

Bingo! Very, very interesting. It seems that a discrete niche operation was developed aside from the mainstream recycling/scrap system we all see. Thanks a lot.

Also, I found the following story and it is mentioned that crematorium operators in 30 countries deal with some Netherlands based corporation to have these metals recovered and recycled, then usually give their profits to charities. Only 40 on 1200 operators keep the profits for themselves. https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/crem...dies-1.4623039

By pure randomness and very weird timing, tonight, I was surfing for something else on my smart TV and I found another similar story this time from Belgium. It seems that they also sent their "ultimate products" to the same Netherlands company. It was mentioned that the latter has improved its recovery process and the Brussels location shown in that story made ten years ago 1000 Euros (USD 1100) per year to 14 000 (USD 15400) per year now for their local charities. That's only one location. There's way more money there that I would ever thought.