JANET STREET-PORTER: Funerals are a melodramatic rip-off, so let’s all raise a glass to the prospect of being flushed quietly down the drain!

• e-mail

The big let down in any funeral is the moment when the ugly wooden box with metal handles appears.

Even if the deceased has opted for an eco-friendly wicker basket, you can’t stop thinking about what’s inside.

People, who in life, might have been fashion conscious or stylish, end up in a naff container so the mourners can feel a bit better.

Why do funerals need a body at all? The person who is dead couldn’t care less.

Surely, the moment you die, your body is completely useless - unless you’ve donated it to medical science.

Dean Fisher, director of the Donated Body Program at UCLA, shows off a machine called a Resomator which completes a water cremation

There’s a growing movement in favour of liquidising the corpse - instead of burning a huge amount of energy to incinerate us (hardly very green) - there’s a process which ‘cooks’ cadavers in chemicals and water at around 160 degrees Centigrade.

The flesh becomes liquid and the bones are separated, easily crumbling into dust which can be returned to loved ones in an urn. The resultant liquid is non-polluting and can be poured away. Doesn’t that sound attractive? It does to me.

Funerals can be held without digging a hole in the ground, without a casket sliding behind red curtains and into the flames as we sing an appropriate hymn, and instead we could celebrate the person’s life rather than their death, which usually costs a fortune.

Water cremation involves putting a body is put into a steel vat with an alkaline solution that accelerates the natural breakdown of the body, turning all but bones into liquid that can be poured down a drain. Pictured above, a Resomator used during for the water cremation

An end without a tribute by a priest who is mouthing platitudes, hastily scribbled on a card.

Water burials are highly controversial but they are legal in three provinces in Canada and 14 states in the USA.

The EU legalised the process back in 2006, as a way of getting rid of cattle contaminated by disease, but now the British government is being asked to rule on whether that process can be extended to humans.

One savvy Metropolitan authority has approved the use of a machine (called a Resomator) but the local water company is refusing to allow the liquid remains to be flushed away. Sandwell Council in the Midlands - like so many other areas - is running out of space for burial grounds.

In some cities, graves are being stacked up in an undignified attempt to create fresh space. So many cemeteries are full that the number of cremations has soared to about 75% of all funerals in the UK.

Conventional funerals are designed to cost you money you haven’t got, to pimp off your grief, as you try to do the best for the loved one.

I write from experience - when my dad died, playing cards in his holiday apartment in the Canary Islands, my mum was distraught.

She summoned my sister and me by phone, and immediately hung up.

On arrival late that night, she tearfully announced she wanted dad cremated. Next day, after talking to the local embassy officials, she realised that would extremely difficult.

Next, she wanted the body flown back to England - until she was told of the cost.

Finally, she opted for a local burial. But as she couldn’t speak Spanish (and I had studied the language at school decades earlier), I was ordered to plan the arrangements for dad’s funeral.

I went to choose a coffin - they were all hideous, and cost well over £1700. Then I had to pay the English-speaking vicar and brief him about my father so he could spout a few platitudes. We chose a couple of hymns, then went to the local cash and carry to buy wine, crisps and snacks for the wake, attended by the neighbours in his building. The service was utterly banal.

My dad is now resting in a shelf in graveyard high above Los Christianos on Tenerife, a place I have no intention of visiting.

How fantastic it would have been to have skipped the funeral, got an urn from a water burial company, and brought his bones back to the UK where we could have had a nice little memorial ceremony on the allotment where he grew vegetables, or on his favourite golf course.

My mother’s funeral was equally bizarre, conducted entirely in Welsh - her little joke to put her children in our place as we were born in England and didn’t speak a word of her native language.

The Catholic Church (and Anglicans) love funerals because clergy and choristers get paid, burial plots have to be purchased, and it keeps the church busy, reinforcing their sagging brand. Funeral directors supply horse-drawn carriages, with the animals wearing black plumes. Pall bearers in black suits and top hats who aren’t members of the family. Why are we still re-enacting gangster movies?

The future of death is alkaline hydrolysis, in spite of the UK Water authority announcing “we don’t think the public will like the idea”.

Why not? The liquid produced by the process is filtered twice, and is probably cleaner than the stuff that comes out of the tap in London, which must contain traces of cocaine and hormone replacement therapy at the very least.

Talking of pollution, we flush huge amounts of grease and fat down the sink - recently a monster ‘Fatberg’ blocked part of the sewage system in London’s Whitechapel and took an army of workmen and explosives to break up - and yet we are not going to be allowed to add purified human bodies to the mix.

The process is considered to be a new way to 'green-ify' death, as concern grows over the carbon footprint that is left by burials and standard cremations (file photo of a cemetery)

During a cremation, the temperature reaches 1150 degrees centigrade, and the fumes from mercury fillings in teeth leech into the atmosphere. Attendants open the doors of the furnace and rake the bodies to ensure all is being burnt.

With the water process, knee replacements, artificial hip joints, penis implants and fillings, are all left behind, rinsed and disposed of properly.

You probably think I am obsessed about death, as I recently promoted living wills, so we don’t end up being kept alive against our wishes. Now, I’m begging you to toughen up about death.

Stop referring to it as a ‘passing’- that’s not even grammatical. When someone dies, they have died, full stop. If you believe in a God (like me), then you hope that the deceased will find peace in an afterlife.

But their passage to this enlightened state won’t be improved by being incinerated and adding to the world’s appalling pollution.