Innovation

Let Your Love Grow is a product designed for the purpose of creating a living memorial for lost loved ones. A living memorial is defined on the company's website as “a special plant dedicated to someone’s life and legacy.” The product provides a comforting and beautiful way to remember one’s life on earth. The innovation incorporates ashes of your loved ones to the soil and that promotes plant life. By itself, cremated ashes release toxins into the environment and do not promote plant life but the Let Your Love Grow mixture when combined with the ashes corrects these chemical imbalances. This creates nutrient-rich soil that is ideal for scattering and memorial planting.

The mixture is sold in a biodegradable container and offsets the toxicity of cremated ash by diluting the high pH and sodium levels found in cremated remains. To promote the growth of plant life, the mixture is made with organic materials that naturally release the nutrients locked in cremated ash. The innovation allows grieving families to honor their lost loved ones in an eco-friendly and sustainable way. Through the creation of their product, Let Your Love Grow seeks to help families through their personal grieving journey. The mixture can be used to honor lost individuals and pets. One can honor their loved ones by using this mixture to grow a houseplant, small succulent, plant a tree or start a garden. The mixture is sold with a kit that includes simple instructions and a measuring scoop, making it easy to use for everyone. Along with their product, the company website also contains a blog that assists those who have endured a loss to find comfort. The company focuses on celebrating life in a way that is beneficial to our environment. The living memorials allow loved ones to live on in a new way, providing them with peace through nature.

The Let Your Love Grow mixture is currently sold internationally in the United States, United Kingdom, and New Zealand. The company is seeking to expand its availability to other places around the world, allowing more individuals to start a new life cycle while honoring their loved ones. The company is constantly researching the environmental impacts associated with traditional burial. They continue to utilize their blog to emphasize and raise awareness of more sustainable ways to honor our loved ones. Through their product, Let Your Love Grow seeks to help its customers overcome the heartache from the loss of a loved one while honoring them in a way that gives back to our ecosystem.

Inspiration

What I found most interesting about Bob Jenkins' innovation was that his product and company did not begin as an environmental initiative. After the loss of his pet dachshund Silke, Bob and his wife Annette searched for the perfect way to honor their beloved pet. Bob and Annette traveled to a pet crematory, where they found out that the ashes of pets would be thrown into landfills when their owners did not want to keep them. As pet owners, Bob and his wife found this unsettling. They asked the pet crematory if they would allow them to experiment with and perform research on the unwanted cremated remains. From this moment on, Bob and Annette set out to find ways to preserve cremated remains and create memorials. Alongside an environmental engineer, they began to test different composts in the hope of using the ashes to breed new life through plants. They began to notice that many of the plants were dying, and so they decided to test the ashes. Finding that the remains were incredibly high in pH and sodium levels, they determined them to be toxic. The company’s mission then shifted to finding a solution for the existing problem of soil contamination. When they realized the importance of creating an all-organic compost to preserve cremated remains, Let Your Love Grow was born.

Bob described their mission as “to find environmentally safe disposable methods for bodies both human and animal,” explaining that the problem may sound simple but there are many factors that go into the process. Throughout the interview, Bob emphasized the company’s continuing research, stating that “We have never stopped researching.” Let Your Love Grow continues to research the impact of body disposition, whether cremated or full body. The company’s years of devoted research has led to the creation of living memorials that serve as a sustainable way to honor loved ones.

Overall impact

The innovation manages to leave a long-term positive impact on our environment, as well as on the lives of the many people who have lost someone dear to them. Bob explained in our interview that his job has provided him with several rewarding experiences that he has carried with him throughout his life. He mentioned that many people who use his product had been keeping their loved one’s ashes at home, unable to part with them. He described a touching story in which he helped a family part with the ashes of their father that they had kept for over forty years. The family wanted to find the perfect way to honor their father, and after the loss of their mother, they took the ashes of their mother, father, and dog to plant a tree on their family farm. Bob helped them with the planting, describing it as an incredibly warm experience.

His product manages to provide families with comfort, which makes his job gratifying. The innovation Let Your Love Grow leaves a tremendous impact as it creates a memorial that will last forever. The planted memorials created by Let Your Love Grow will also continue to provide oxygen to the atmosphere and leave a positive impact on the earth. Bob expressed that, as opposed to traditional burial practices and cremation, this product does not disturb our natural environment but enhances it. As the only product of its kind, Let Your Love Grow has left a major impact on the lives of grieving individuals and has increased awareness of an environmental issue that not many are conscious of.

Business benefit

The creation of this innovative mixture prompted the introduction of Let Your Love Grow to the market, in hopes of providing families with the ability to honor their loved ones sustainably. The Let Your Love Grow website explains that they are the only product on the market that addresses high pH and sodium levels, the two major issues associated with cremated ash. The creation of Let Your Love Grow has prompted the introduction of a new product to the market that combats the environmental issues associated with traditional burials and the dispersion of cremated remains. Through the company’s research, conducted by their intimate team, they discovered the harsh effects of cremated ash on plant life. The company today still maintains their original team of ten individuals, consisting of Bob and his wife Annette alongside a forensic taphonomist, forensic anthropologist, forensic entomologist, a plant and soil scientist, a landscape architect, two certified pet loss professionals, and an urban and environmental planner. The team takes pride in their job as it allows them to continue their research and help families through their grieving process. Through the business, they have had the opportunity to give back to individuals and the environment alike, making their work both rewarding and fulfilling. The team has been working together for over ten years and plans to continue their research to promote further awareness and advocate for the better use of our land. The company hopes to expand its market to help individuals cope with the loss of loved ones around the world and encourage others to begin a new life cycle after the loss of a loved one.

Social and environmental benefit

This innovation benefits society as it promotes the proper use of our land and reduces our carbon footprint. While we seek to honor our loved ones through traditional burials or through the dispersion of their cremated remains, these practices release harsh chemicals back into our environment. The burial of bodies into the soil releases chemicals such as embalming fluids back into our air and requires the use of a lot of land resources. During our interview, Bob emphasized the loss of land due to burials in the United States expressing that there are enough casket buried bodies to build another Golden Gate Bridge. While cremated remains are more eco-friendly than traditional burials, the remains are also toxic to the environment and plant life as they have high pH and sodium levels. Through the innovation of Let Your Love Grow, the product promotes a safe way to honor our loved ones. It is beneficial as it provides a sustainable option in which individuals can grieve and honor their loved ones yet do not have to use land or release harmful chemicals back into the atmosphere. The innovation Is also beneficial as it provides for a new life. The mixture allows families to create plant memorials that give back to our environment emitting oxygen into our atmosphere. The product helps consumers through the grieving process and allows them to let the lives of their lost loved ones live on. As Let Your Love Grow ships their product in the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand it has promoted better use of our land globally. This product allows us to persevere land resources and helps it flourish by contributing to the growth of new life.

Interview

Bob Jenkins, Co-Founder