This is what happens to metal implants after someone is cremated

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This is what happens to metal implants after someone is cremated

When people are cremated, everything in the body is turned into fine ash— everything except for any non-organic components or implants the person may have had. So what happens to all those metal pins and knees and joints and bones? They’re recycled into new metal implants.

“You tell people what you do, and they think… well, that’s a bit strange,” says Ruud Verberne above the din of giant sorting machines twirling and clanking.

Verberne is co-founder of OrthoMetals, which recycles metal implants from cremated human bodies. That’s everything from steel pins to titanium hips and cobalt-chrome knees.

These are the knees that we have to recover,” he says. “Some metals can be sorted by magnets. And the remaining have to be sorted by hand.”

Strange it may be, and a bit macabre perhaps, but this kind of recycling is a growth industry.

“I know the existence of five or six competitors that we have, most of them in the United States,” says Verberne, whose company is based in the Dutch city of Zwolle. “But we were first.”

Verberne had a long career in aluminium recycling. Then, in 1987, he met Jan Gabriels, an orthopaedic surgeon, who asked him what happened to the metal implants he spent his working life attaching to patients.

Verberne had no idea, so he did some research and he found out that they were thrown away. “They were basically buried,” he says.

The value of implants collected from a crematorium is only a fraction of their value before surgery, but they are made from good quality metal that is worth recycling.

“The operation to provide a new hip may cost you around £5,000 ($8,000. 6,000 euros),” he explains.

“But the return value as scrap is maybe, per kilo, around £10 ($16, 12 euros). And there are five hips per kilo!”

In 1997, Gabriels and Verberne founded OrthoMetals. Fifteen years later the company recycles more than 250 tons of metal from cremations annually, which gets used to make things like cars, planes, and even wind turbines.

The company works by collecting the metal implants for nothing, sorting them and then selling them - taking care to see that they are melted down, rather than reused.

After deducting costs, 70-75% of the proceeds are returned to the crematoria, for spending on charitable projects.