Eternal Reefs Offers Private Green Memorial Experience

ATLANTA – Eternal Reefs has been honoring loved ones and memorializing their passing by placing their ashes in marine-restoring reef balls for over 10 years, but today marks the first time families can do so privately. The memorial reef site is located in the ocean waters off the Sarasota, FL coast and is an attractive, environmentally-sensitive option to occupying plots of land with expensive cemetery space. The Sarasota reef site, The Silvertooth Reef, is already home to hundreds of Eternal Reef memorials and is a thriving location covered with marine life and growth.

Reef balls are an alternative to ash spreading in which cremated remains are incorporated into huge, hollow, structures that look like wiffle balls and foster new marine growth, replenishing the world’s diminishing natural reef systems. The Eternal Reefs program offers families a rewarding, highly participatory way to give back to the environment even after death and now families who prefer can do so in private.

“What we do is such an intensely personal experience that many families want to take the journey in private,” Eternal Reefs CEO George Frankel, said. “Now, we can help families memorialize their loved ones with private activities with only designated family members present.”

Eternal Reefs encourages families to be involved in creating their loved one’s memorial reef because it can be a moving and healing experience. On the first day, if they wish, family members can mix the concrete and cremated remains and have the opportunity to personalize the Eternal Reef with handprints, written messages and other memorabilia pressed into the damp concrete.

On the second day, the loved one’s Eternal Reef is loaded on a specially chartered boat. Military honors, if appropriate, are presented dockside then family members board a second boat which follows to the reef site. Family members watch as their loved one’s Eternal Reef is lowered to the bottom and then they dedicate the reef, a positive and therapeutic experience for families and the sea.

With every Memorial Reef, public or private, families receive two memorial certificates that identify the GPS coordinates of the reef and all reefs are marked with a bronze plaque. Families often return to the memorial reef site throughout the years to dive, fish or visit by boat.

An Eternal Reefs memorial reef is specially engineered to entice fish and other forms of sea life into the reef, building new habitats in and around the uneven structure. The Eternal Reef (which can weigh between 600 and 4,500 pounds and measure between 2- by 4-feet high and 4- by 6-feet wide) quickly becomes a permanent part of the marine seascape.

About Eternal Reefs Inc.

Eternal Reefs, Inc is an Atlanta-based company that provides a creative, environmentally-enhancing way to memorialize the cremated remains of a loved one. The company incorporates cremated remains into a concrete mixture used to cast artificial reef formations. The artificial reefs are dedicated as permanent memorials while also bolstering natural coastal reef formations. Since 1998, the company has placed more than 1,500 Memorial Reefs in 20 locations off the coasts of Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Maryland, New Jersey, Texas and Virginia, substantially increasing the ocean’s diminishing reef systems. Memorial reefs can only go in properly permitted locations by the US Government. Contact Eternal Reefs Inc. for more information on the Private Placement Option at: www.eternalreefs.com