Coming clean on growing number of lonely deaths in South Korea

Though its overall economy has slowed, South Korea has one sector experiencing rapid growth: firms that are called in to clean up when someone dies alone.

In a country where the unravelling of Confucian traditions means that many elderly people are no longer cared for by family, more South Koreans are dying in solitude, after either taking their own lives or wasting away from neglect. Small companies provide services such as cleaning and sterilising a room where someone died and decomposed before they were detected. They can also dispose and incinerate the deceased's possessions.

It is government authorities that must remove the body, but these private companies are sometimes hired by landlords of tenants who had no known family, or by relatives of the deceased.

"Our business has almost doubled in the past year and more companies like us have begun operating recently," said Park Yeon-moon, 49, a director of BioEco, one such company.

These firms will remove and replace flooring to get rid of the stubborn smells that remain after a tenant's death. They also sterilise all exposed surfaces and purify the air with chemicals. The services cost anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending on the size of the space and the extent of the deceased's decomposition.

"Most of the bodies are not discovered until long after they have died, so we have to take care of the secretions and bad odours that have been caused," Park said.