Testing and Improving a sustainable memorial service in UK's Funeral Industry

Resting Reef (RR) is a memorial service that regenerates life in people's afterlives and radically changes how we see and experience one of the most traumatic events in our lifetime - death. We do this by building beautiful artificial reef structures with a formula containing human ashes and crushed oyster shells, two elements that nourish and promote marine growth, as an eco-friendly alternative to traditional burial methods.

Traditional burials require large amounts of land, chemical embalming fluids that seep into the groundwater, and materials with intense emissions like steel. Each cremation releases 400 kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere. RR, as a solution to this, promotes marine growth with the regeneration of approximately 100 oysters per reef which equals a positive impact of 7 million litres of water filtered every year (Beck et al., 2011). By promoting the growth of oysters, seagrass will grow in the area, and fish will flourish. It also prevents billions of pounds of erosion damage to coastal communities (Stokes et al., 2012). Individual memorial reef structures can be placed together to create entire reefs to boost natural oyster reefs, which have decreased by 85% due to human activities, making them one of the world's most threatened bio-diverse habitats.

At present, in addition to memorial reef prototyping, RR has conducted a customer discovery showing a high market demand and fit. However, in the discovery, further questions about the service and stakeholder involvement were raised that now need to be explored and defined in collaboration with Eden Funeral Directors (Eden), an independent funeral home based near the coast in the south of the UK with many years of industry knowledge and customer experience.

This project is also responding to a recent pivotal moment in the UK's funeral industry. Aquamation (an alternative form to traditional cremation that is six times less carbon intensive than cremation) was recently legalised in the UK. This type of ashes has 50% more phosphorus to nourish marine growth when incorporated into RR's formula. This poses a crucial opportunity for RR and Eden to understand the demand for this new green service, and how to integrate it in their supply chain.

This project will follow the design framework of the double-diamond, ensuring a structured and effective process. Also, ideation sessions will be conducted, followed by Design Thinking principles to identify and propose key touchpoints.