Swift Current Funeral Home is pleased to offer both water-based and flame-based cremation in our services alongside traditional earth burial. We feel we can serve our families better by offering multiple alternatives for their loved ones final journey. Final preparations can be difficult and we want our families to be aware of all their options, so they can feel confident knowing they made a well-informed decision.

We are proud to be able to add water-based cremation to our list of service offerings. On January 21, 2019 the approval and applicable license was issued from the Province of Saskatchewan (via the Funeral and Cremation Services Council) to officially begin offering this cremation service to our client families. Approval was received from the City of Swift Current on November 5, 2018.

The technical name for this water-based process is called alkaline hydrolysis and is the same process that occurs in nature when a body is laid to rest in soil. With this system it is accelerated through the combination of water-flow, temperature, and alkalinity. We have also learned that our own physical bodies use this very principal in our lower digestive system extracting nutrient from the foods we eat.

Through this gentle and respectful process, there are no emissions of harmful greenhouse gasses. You will not see an industrial smokestack on our building nor will there be any odor, the equipment runs no louder than the sound level of a dishwasher so there will be no additional noise pollution. Water Cremation has over a 90% energy savings when compared to flame-based cremation and 10% of the carbon footprint of flame-based cremation.

Water Cremation has been used by medical science institutions for over twenty years in North America and has been an offered service in Saskatchewan since 2011, when Drew Gray of Gray’s Funeral Chapel in Prince Albert first began offering this alternative to flame-based cremation. Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Quebec are the first Canadian provinces to approve Aquamation, and BC has applied to their provincial government for approval. In the US, fourteen states currently offer this alternative. We at SCFH can proudly say we are currently the furthest out west in Canada offering alkaline hydrolysis and are the second of two in Saskatchewan to have this service be provided. 

Click to learn more about Bio-Response Solutions and their purpose.