Could Cremation Ashes be the Key to Saving Marine Life?

Let's be honest: mixing human remains with cement and placing them on the seabed to host marine life is objectively strange. Not "quirky startup" strange, but….. "Wait, we're doing what with Grandma's ashes?" strange.

And yet here we are, an innovative startup has turned this into a business. They've conducted ceremonies, secured partnerships, collected testimonials off human memorial services. Families snorkelling around the memorial reefs of their loved ones, and they report feeling... good about it.

The question isn't whether this is weird. Everything about death is weird. The question is whether this is weirder than what we're already doing.

The Personal Mathematics of Grief

Seven years ago, Aura's father died unexpectedly in Mexico. "From one day to the other, my life changed completely," she says. The grief arrived sudden and catastrophic. The funeral felt wrong - something about the bureaucratic process troubled her in ways she couldn't name. The experience clung to her like an unanswered question.

Most people channel that kind of loss into therapy or support groups. Aura also channeled hers into a master's degree studying Global Innovation Design, and before that  spending her time in human emotion research projects in Barcelona, part-timing as a furniture and project designer in Mexico and honing her ideas at a startup accelerator at MIT. During her Master's, she collected stories, asked why death remains taboo, wondered why mentioning her father after his passing made people including her shift in their seats.

She was learning what the data confirms: studies show that almost 1 in 3 of bereaved individuals report feeling overwhelmed by funeral planning, often making permanent choices while in acute grief. The world expects you to navigate complex decisions during your most vulnerable moments.

During one of her visits back home in Mexico, she encountered salt urns which are basically biodegradable vessels that families filled with ashes and placed in water and watched them dissolve. Used primarily in European and North American water burials, they represented something poetic: release, dissolution, return.

"It felt incomplete," she says. Symbolic but sometimes empty.

Then she met Louise, a Norwegian sustainability designer, and ocean advocate who grew up surrounded by fjords and absorbed ecological thinking the way some children absorb language. Louise wanted to address marine ecosystem collapse - a crisis reaching catastrophic scale. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in collaboration with UNEP further warns that up to 90% of coral reefs could disappear by 2050 even if global warming is limited to 1.5°C.

Aura told her about the salt urns. And then Aura asked a question: What if instead of dissolving, the remains built something? What if the symbolism had an impactful journey?

That question - posed between an emotion and experience designer and a conservation enthusiast - became Resting Reef. They didn't know how it would work or what it would look like. They spent a year developing the concept. Three years after graduating, they know exactly how it works, and they can "proudly offer it to families."

Her father's memory defined the path of her life and now gives her purpose. It's either the most elaborate grief processing mechanism ever created or a genuine innovation in how we handle death and ecological restoration simultaneously.

Possibly both.

The Baseline Absurdity

Consider the current options for the dignified memorialisation of human remains:

Option A: Burial

The dominant practice across Sub-Saharan Africa, deeply connected to ancestral land and spiritual beliefs about the body's return to earth. In Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities worldwide, burial carries profound theological meaning about resurrection, respect, and the sacredness of the body.

The modern Western industrial version: preserve the body with embalming fluids (a carcinogen we've decided makes the appropriate preservative for people we loved). Place them in a $3,000-$10,000 box engineered to prevent the natural decomposition we're ostensibly returning them to nature for. Lower into the ground. Top with several tons of concrete. Visit occasionally to leave flowers that die because there's no actual soil ecosystem left.

The average funeral costs $7,848 in the United States, as of 2025 averagely £4,667 in the UK, and around $11,039 AUD in Australia as of 2021. In many African and Asian communities, traditional burial practices involve less processing and more community participation, though urbanization is creating land scarcity pressures.

Option B: Cremation

Now the majority practice in many Asian countries - over 99% in Japan, approximately 80% in China, and over 80% in India where it's central to Hindu tradition. In Western countries, cremation rates are rising: 60.5% in the United States, 81.2% in England & Wales, and further projected to hit the 80% mark in Canada by 2029.

The process: burn the body at 1,400-1,800°F for 2-3 hours, consuming roughly 285 kWh of energy - equivalent to one month of electricity for an average UK household. Pulverize the remaining bone fragments. Put the resulting calcium powder in either: a) an urn on your mantle that you eventually feel awkward about, b) a hole in the ground (see Option A, but cheaper), or c) scatter somewhere meaningful, which is illegal in most places and creates awkward moments when wind direction betrays you.

Each culture brings its own meaning: Hindu families often scatter ashes in sacred rivers like the Ganges; Japanese families may divide ashes among family members in Buddhist traditions; Western families increasingly seek natural settings.

Option C: Resting Reef

(Note: This is a post-cremation choice - families first choose cremation or aquamation, then select this as what to do with the ashes.)

Mix ashes with shells, sand, and cement - creating a strong material. Mould into textured structures with tunnels and ridges, inspired by natural reef formations and crafted with care by local artisans. Carefully lower to degraded seabed using ropes and scuba divers. Wait for corals to attach and fish to move in. Visit by... booking a dive trip? Looking toward the horizon? Or by receiving frequent underwater footage and updates in your inbox.

Rank these by absurdity. I'll wait.

The Death Industry Is Already Bonkers

Americans spend $20 billion annually on funerals. Twenty. Billion. For an industry whose core product is making dead bodies temporarily look not-dead before making them permanently unavailable.

We've normalized this. Turned it into tradition. Made it feel inevitable, proper, respectful.

But here's what's actually happening in modern Western burial: we preserve bodies with chemicals, seal them in airtight boxes, and slow down decomposition - the thing every organism on Earth is designed to do, because in our view the alternative feels disrespectful. To whom? The person is dead. They're beyond disrespect. We're performing respect for ourselves, for other living people who are watching us perform respect.

This isn't a criticism of burial itself but rather it's an observation about how industrial death care has transformed sacred practices into consumption rituals. Traditional burial practices across Africa, Asia, and Indigenous communities often involve far less intervention, more community participation, and deeper connection to nature and ancestors.

Resting Reef is just more honest about what it's selling: transformation as performance, meaning-making as product, death care as environmental contribution.

The Science Is Accidentally Perfect

Here's where it gets uncomfortable: the science actually makes sense.

Cremated remains are naturally rich in calcium phosphate, the same mineral that forms human bone, as shown in bone mineral research from the National Library of Medicine. Corals, on the other hand, build their skeletons from calcium carbonate by extracting calcium and carbonate ions from seawater, according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. When ashes are combined with marine-safe reef structures, they form a sturdy base that can support coral attachment and marine life growth.

This feels too neat. Too convenient. Like the universe playing a cosmic joke where the punchline is that death actually does feed life, not metaphorically but chemically.

The Bali pilot site was chosen because it represented specific ecological damage: bomb fishing which BTW UNEP say is equal to reef bombing and cyanide poisoning had shredded natural reef structures needed for coral growth and ecosystem recovery. "What you see is seabed, just with no texture, completely empty," Aura explains. The water above still held nutrients, but coral needs somewhere to anchor. Without hard structure, life simply floats past. Everything is there, and yet nothing grows.

So they lowered these memorial reefs into the water and, just a short distance away, left another stretch of seabed untouched - the same depth, same currents, same story of destruction. One site seeded with memory and minerals. 

And then they waited. Watched. Counted. Month after month, divers logged every new arrival, every shift in the underwater neighbourhood.

Life returned almost shyly at first. A flash of movement here, a curious fish there. Then the numbers began to stack: fish species climbing from 46 to 84 on the memorial reef side while the untouched site stayed eerily still - a quiet reminder of what happens when nothing is offered to help life begin again.

The fish don't care that these structures contain human remains. They just need substrate. Architecture. Complexity. The reefs provide that. It's working because of the ashes, not despite them.

Consider the implications: we've spent millennia treating human remains as either sacred objects requiring preservation or waste requiring disposal. We've built entire industries around these two poles - the reverent burial and the efficient cremation.

And now, Resting Reef has created a third option: human remains as a resource. Not metaphorically, not spiritually, but chemically and ecologically valuable.

The death industry didn't find this. It took two outsiders thinking laterally about grief and ocean degradation to connect dots no one else had bothered to draw.

Which raises the question: if we've discovered that human remains are ecologically valuable, what exactly have we been doing with them for the past few thousand years?

The Credentials Problem - NO

This all sounds compelling in theory. But a reasonable doubt follows: who are the people behind this idea? The credentials of the founders become a natural point of scrutiny. Aura and Louise are not marine biologists. Not environmental scientists. Not death industry veterans.

They're designers who had an idea and started calling actual experts - marine biologists, local fishermen, conservation friendly NGOs, to figure out if it was viable. This is either entrepreneurial spirit at its finest or a case study in how anyone can enter any industry with sufficient confidence and willingness to learn.

Here's the surprising part: it's working. Their reefs attract fish and species counts have increased substantially. Dr Zach Boakes, who also doubles up as the lead Restoration and Conservation Lead at Resting Reef alongside other marine biologists in a study confirms that artificial structures perform as well as or better than some traditional artificial reefs. "The design of our reefs have demonstrated to be even more effective than some artificial reef alternatives out there," Aura reports.

The amateur approach succeeded where caution might have meant paralysis.

Then again, who are the experts in turning human remains into fish habitat? That’s for you to find out. Sometimes the audacity of initial non-experts is precisely what creates new solutions.

The development process reveals the value of their initial naivety. They worked with marine biologists on initial designs - tunnels for eels and crabs, textured surfaces for coral attachment, ridges for biodiversity. But the breakthrough came from incorporating local knowledge.

"We understood the importance of incorporating local knowledge," Aura explains. They collaborated with Balinese fishermen who work the waters daily, who understand currents and sediment patterns and species behavior in ways textbooks hardly capture.

This echoes a broader truth: Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), particularly from Indigenous communities worldwide, often holds solutions western science is only beginning to recognize. Pacific Islander communities have managed marine resources sustainably for millennia, similarly West African fishing communities understand seasonal patterns that elude short-term studies.

The fishermen suggested adding small bases to elevate structures so sediments wouldn't bury them. They recommended additional weight for stability against currents. These weren't minor adjustments, they were the difference between success and failure.

"This was only possible because of that local knowledge," she says.

The final design emerged from this collision: scientific expertise plus local wisdom plus amateur willingness to ask basic questions. The professionals knew what reef structures needed. The locals knew what these specific waters required. The amateurs knew enough to listen to both.

The Pet Prelude

As the physical design took shape, so did their understanding of the memorial's purpose. They began to see that the line we draw between human and animal companions is often, in the landscape of grief, entirely artificial. This realization didn't just refine their mission; it expanded it.

Honor Pet, a U.S. based end-of-life care, aquamation, euthanasia and pre-planning center, became a partner early on. Their owner became a customer, memorializing her own pet - the ultimate product endorsement. 

Research on pet loss increasingly recognizes that grief for companion animals can be as profound as grief for humans - particularly for people who lived alone, faced social isolation, or experienced their pet as their primary relationship.

Aura reports that the grief looks identical between pet and human memorials. "The intensity is proportional to the bond," she explains. Which sounds obvious until you realize what it implies: we've created an entire memorial service that treats beloved pets with the same gravitas as human loved ones because, functionally, the grief is the same.

The families who choose this for their pets describe the same need that human-memorial families describe: for the loss to mean something beyond simply ending. For continuation. For transformation.

The Ceremony Contradiction

Resting Reef's ceremonies are "non-religious by default but co-created with families to incorporate their spiritual needs."

And it works. Families report profound experiences. Sharing circles where strangers become vulnerable. Smiles when remembering loved ones. "Life-affirming" mourning, which sounds like an oxymoron but apparently isn't.

"Once you create safe and compassionate spaces," Aura says, "magic happens and families open up."

Magic. She deploys the same vocabulary religions have monopolized for millennia, except she's describing a process co-designed with marine biologists and fishermen. The ceremony has structure - boat ride, gathering, reef placement- but no doctrine. Ritual without religion. Performance without prescription.

"We give a little bit of guidance and support, but we also have the space for them to co-create the ceremony," she explains. Some families want religious elements incorporated. Others don't. Resting Reef accommodates both. The secular memorial service bends to accommodate sacred ritual when requested.

In Bali, Hindu priests bless each reef before placement, asking divine permission to place human remains underwater. Resting Reef does not resist this; instead, they incorporate it. It’s a classic case of modern innovation bowing to ancient tradition. The ‘noble communal’ idea behind the reefs only works if communities accept it, so every local belief system becomes part of the process.

"Instead of avoiding it, we acknowledge these local traditions and make them part of what we do," Aura says.

I still cannot decide if this is sacred or corporate or beautiful or all three. Maybe that's grief. You hold two truths and then a third one shows up and laughs at you.

What Aura has learned from witnessing these ceremonies: "Grief is different for every person. There is this element of how families remember their loved ones and they tend to smile.” You start realizing it could be life-affirming in some ways, and it's not always negative."

Research on grief rituals across cultures confirms this: humans need structured time to acknowledge loss, share memories, and witness their grief in community. The specific form matters less than the intentionality.

The cynic says: we've replaced God with good vibes and called it meaning.

The pragmatist says: if people find comfort in it, does the mechanism matter?

The realist says: Resting Reef channels funds from the traditional death care industry toward marine restoration. They're intermediaries redirecting funeral spending from purely memorial purposes toward environmental contribution; channeling funds that would go to caskets, burial plots, and traditional services, and routing it instead toward ocean ecosystem recovery while still honouring the deceased.

All three are probably right.

The Transformation Process

The mechanics powering Resting Reef are surprisingly straightforward. They take the ashes and create a formula - mixing them with oyster shells, sand, and cement. One person's ashes per reef. They pour the material into moulds featuring the tunnels and textures designed for marine life. The structures cure for several days, then they're unmoulded, revealing the final reef shape.

The local community helps transport reefs from beachside production to boats. Then comes the careful lowering with ropes to the seabed. Experienced scuba divers arrange the reef system underwater.

The structures create a foundation that corals and algae can attach. The tunnels and features allow mobile species - eels, crabs, fish, to swim through and shelter. It becomes an ecosystem. This strong foundation transforms into habitat for thousands of species.

Beyond here, families receive updates, new species get discovered and growth gets documented. The monitoring continues, and each survey reveals more life where there was once emptiness.

The Expansion Question

Resting Reef is planning to expand. Mexico hopefully next, Aura says - she's from there originally. Then potentially other coastal regions facing reef degradation all around the world.

The strategy: partner with local NGOs who know marine conditions and have community trust, rather than only building internal teams everywhere. Efficient scaling that doubles as cultural sensitivity.

Here's what expansion requires, and it's more complex than simply finding an ocean:

Environmental factors: Areas where reefs historically existed but have been degraded doubled with the availability of ‘right depth’. Somewhat sheltered locations, not open ocean with punishing currents or hurricane zones. Places with precedent for reef growth, where success is probable rather than random.

Cultural factors: Communities where cremation is accepted and practiced. In most places worldwide -traditional burial remains dominant, though urban areas are seeing increased cremation as land becomes scarce. 

Social factors: Community acceptance. In Bali, this mostly meant bottom-up approval - discovering with local leaders, religious authorities and residents that this was acceptable. In the UK, it means top-down government permitting. Different cultures require different approaches.

Regulatory factors: Permits vary everywhere. Some nations like the UK have clear frameworks for ocean-based memorials. Others have no regulations because they've never considered the practice. Some places prioritise local community consent. Others government approval. Some need environmental impact studies. The dynamics shift by location. "It's not a one-size-fits-all," Aura notes.

They're also mapping demand - tracking where inquiries come from, understanding where interest clusters, then identifying sites that could serve those markets. The business model requires matching ecological plus cultural openness with regulatory feasibility.

So the trick here is finding the sweet spot: ecological damage meets cultural acceptance meets market demand.

Resting Reef serves families who are actively seeking meaningful alternatives to traditional memorials, while simultaneously identifying degraded marine ecosystems that can benefit from reef restoration structures. The business model connects people looking for environmental legacy options with ocean conservation needs.

The Ecosystem Integration

The reefs become part of the ecosystem. Fish eat algae growing on the structures, larger fish eat those fish, nutrients cycle through the living community. The person becomes, quite literally, part of the ecosystem - not as food, but as foundation. The ashes create the structural habitat that allows this entire cycle to exist. This is what we mean by "life cycle." Not metaphor but actual ecological incorporation through architecture. The calcium from human remains forms lasting structures that marine life depends on for shelter, breeding grounds, and protection.

The salt urn Aura's spoke about seeing earlier in Mexico represented "symbolism that felt incomplete." The reef is symbolism made solid. Or rather, ashes made structure made habitat made continuation - you got to read that really sloooowly.

Families report loving this. "They love the fact that their loved one is out there having a beautiful impact and transforming into something beautiful," Aura says. "There is that poetic element of the continuation of death in a different shape."

The picture in your head changes. Instead of a grave or an urn on the mantle, families imagine their loved ones "surrounded by fish and with colourful life." The image shifts from grey to vibrant. From static to dynamic. From ended to transformed.

"Most families tell us they love the fact that their loved one is still out there," Aura reports.

Continuing bonds theory in grief research supports this: humans don't "let go" of the deceased. We find ways to maintain connection while adapting to their absence. For some families, knowing their loved one feeds an ecosystem provides that connection.

If you find this beautiful, you're probably right.

If you find this unsettling, you're also probably right.

The Global Context

What's driving this shift toward alternative memorials globally?

Land scarcity: In densely populated regions like Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and many European cities, traditional burial is becoming physically impossible.

Environmental awareness: A research in the UK in 2021 showed increasing correlation between environmental values and death care choices, particularly among younger generations globally. Studies indicate that climate change awareness influences decisions across life stages, including end-of-life planning.

Declining religious affiliation: Religious "nones" reached 30% in the US, over 50% in much of Europe, and significant percentages in Australia, Canada, and parts of Asia. People are seeking meaning-making practices outside traditional religious frameworks.

Cultural exchange: Globalization means people encounter diverse death practices. A person raised Christian might explore Buddhist concepts. Someone from a cremation culture might choose green burial after learning about it.

Economic pressure: Rising funeral costs push families toward alternatives. The global death care industry is worth over $100 billion, and families are increasingly questioning whether elaborate funerals serve the living or the industry.

The Real Question

Aura says she'd tell someone grieving: "There is space for your grief. I don't believe in moving forward because grief always stays with you. It transforms who you are. With time, you can redefine it, and it can become something that gives you purpose."

This aligns with contemporary grief theory: we don't move on from grief. We learn to carry it differently.

Her father's death "defined the path of my life and is currently giving me purpose."

So here's the math: father unexpectedly passes → daughter grieves → grief becomes academic study and inspiration → study becomes business → business turns other people's loved ones into memorial reefs → this provides purpose → purpose helps metabolize grief.

She became part of and built a business model that required death to provide continued meaning to her own loss.

This is either:

• A beautiful example of transforming tragedy into positive impact

• A genuine innovation in ecological restoration paired with death care

The honest answer is probably: both simultaneously.

The Thing We're Actually Arguing About

Nobody's really arguing about whether reefs help marine ecosystems (they do) or whether families find meaning in these ceremonies (they do) or whether cremated remains contain minerals that help sustain nature (they do).

We're arguing about whether death gets to mean something, and if so, who decides what.

Traditional burial says: death means returning to earth, marking a place and eventually creating a permanent memorial site. This resonates across African communities, Orthodox Christian traditions, and many others who hold sacred beliefs about the body's physical integrity.

Traditional cremation says: death means release, transformation, and in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, progress toward rebirth or spiritual liberation.

Water-based memorials say: death means returning to primordial elements, joining cycles that sustain life; part of beliefs held by Indigenous Pacific communities, Maori traditions, and various coastal cultures.

Resting Reef says: death means transformation, continuation, a celebration of life and ecological contribution.

All three are stories we tell ourselves because the alternative - that death means nothing except cessation of biological function - is unbearable for most people.

The reefs work because fish need substrate. The ceremonies work because people need ritual. The business works because we need death to do something other than simply end.

Resting Reef isn't selling environmental restoration or meaningful memorials or even coral reef rebuilding.

They're selling the hope that absence can become a presence, that ending can become transformation, that three pounds of calcium phosphate can matter after the person who generated it stops mattering in any conventional sense.

What We're Learning

We've stumbled into something that serves multiple needs simultaneously - ecological restoration, grief processing, land scarcity solutions, climate-conscious death care. And we did it by accident, because a woman couldn't stop asking questions about her father's death and met someone who couldn't stop thinking about dying reefs.

The business model is strange when you say it plainly: take human grief and ocean degradation and introduce them to each other. But then, every death care model sounds strange when stripped of euphemism. We've just been performing the same scripts for so long we forgot they were performances.

What makes this different is the honesty. Your grandmother's ashes becomes a marine habitat. The remains rest in peace and they participate in an ecosystem. The memorial isn't static; it grows, changes, and attracts new species.

If you find this beautiful, you're right.

If you find this unsettling, you're also right.

The ocean doesn't judge our need for meaning. It just takes what's offered and builds. The fish don't care about symbolism or ceremony or grief. 

And somehow, impossibly, this helps.

Not because it's more sacred than burial or more correct than any other tradition. It helps because it's honest about what death is: biological material returning to biological systems. And it's honest about what grief needs: connection, continuation, the sense that loss can transform into something other than emptiness.

The question isn't whether this is strange. The question is whether we've been doing something stranger for millennia -preventing decomposition, isolating remains, consuming resources - and calling it tradition simply because it's familiar.
Your Grandmother’s ashes as home for fish might be the most honest thing we've done with human remains in generations.

The strange part isn't that someone finally tried. The strange part is that it took this long.