The US charity has so far sunk close to 3,000 memorial reefs across about 25 sites.
A US-based charity is giving families an option to memorialise their loved ones in an environment-friendly way. The charity, Eternal Reefs, is offering a unique memorial choice that replaces cremation urns and ash scatterings with a permanent environmental living legacy.
The proposed memorial will incorporate a person's cremated remains with a reef ball - a perforated concrete dome - and submerge it onto the ocean floor.
USA Today reported that the reef balls are made of a pH-neutral concrete, with 80 per cent of its weight concentrated in the lower 40 per cent to make the reef stable.
Explaining the design, Eternal Reefs CEO George Frankel said that the reef ball will be able to survive for long, since things like storms and small fish will pass through the hollow vented design.
According to Eternal Reefs, each reef ball will be a metre high and two metres wide, weighing anywhere between 250kg and 1,800kg. The balls have a rough surface that will allow marine plants and animals such as corals and algae to grow on them.
“Corals and all sorts of animals grow better on structure,” Murray Roberts, professor of marine biology at Edinburgh University's school of geosciences, told The Guardian. “I can't see an obvious downside.”
The charity said that this is a way to give back after life “by replenishing the dwindling natural reef systems”.
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The areas of the seabed where these reef balls will be sent are going to be regulated by authorities in the US. The family of friends will be given the GPS coordinates of where their loved one's “grave” is located.
Eternal Reefs has so far sunk close to 3,000 memorial reefs across about 25 sites, from Texas to New Jersey. Each ball costs between $3,000 and $7,500 depending on the size chosen.
The charity is encouraging people to participate “in the creation of their loved one's memorial reef” by placing hand prints and memorabilia in the damp concrete during the casting, making a rubbing of the bronze plaque during the viewing ceremony, placing a flag on their loved one's memorial reef, or boating to the placement site to watch the reef ball being deployed to its final ocean rest.