During our class on sustainability partnerships, I looked in to a partnership called Bonsucro. Supported by the WWF, Bonsucro is a global non-profit that utilizes a certification scheme to help induce sustainable production policies for the sugarcane industry, which is a major source of pollution and waste.

Bonsucro – Logo

While seemingly boring at the time, it led me to a really interesting article, by The Guardian, on Bonsucro and how different groups perceive its effectiveness. The insights can seemingly be broadened for most partnerships of this sort that involve large corporations and a certification process.

The Guardian’s, “Sustainable sugar: Coca-Cola and BP signed up but will it go mainstream?”

Bonsucro has certified 3.66% of the global market for sugarcane since its inception with major members including Coca-Cola, Bacardi, Ferrero Group, BP and Shell. While this is seemingly impressive, the former CEO Nick Goodall had projected 5% by 2014 and 20% by 2017.

Where my interest lies, is in the fact that the article states some feel the opposite about the penetration rate of Bonsucro. The article says some believe that this market share of 3.66% has been too fast to be credible. Jason Potts, co-author of The State of Sustainability Initiatives Review, believes the fact that Bonsucro was positioned as “mainstream” eluded to the fact that it would have minimum requirements for certification so that penetration in to the market could be large-scale.

The Guardian article reads like there are several more people than just Jason Potts that feel this way but when trying to find them, my research came up blank. That being said, it does seem like a reasonable assumption to me that any partnership that involves large firms like Coca-Cola from the outset will be influenced to not radicalize the certification process but rather keep it attainable for these companies. But without giant corporations supporting the partnership, penetration of these certification processes is next to impossible.

This is potentially why there are so many certifications that don’t work in the way that they should – there needs to be a fine balance between corporate support and corporate influence. In my mind, it comes down to whether corporate leadership truly has altruistic intentions and will support certification that is actually as rigorous as needed for truly sustainable change.

Not often (if ever) do we like to think about death. It’s not a topic we are generally willing to discuss at length and far too often we leave ourselves unprepared for its arrival. And so without much thought, we go through the motions of the same post-death rituals that have been done for years and years.  While different cultures have different ways of mourning/celebrating the life lost, the majority of bodies in North America are buried or cremated.

The intense emotional and personal attachment to the deceased person means any notions of sustainable behaviour go out the window and we choose burials that involve massive amounts of wood and steel products for coffins and highly toxic embalming or we choose cremation that emits 540 lbs of carbon dioxide in to the atmosphere per body.

The idea of a loved ones body decomposing is unimaginable to us. So much so, we’d rather they be burned to ash or filled with toxic embalming fluids – a seemingly irrational way of thinking about death.

Enter the Urban Death Project. Still in the design phase, with a Kickstarter soon starting, the Urban Death Project seeks to add a third alternative for honouring your deceased loved one – by letting them decompose. In the middle of these proposed decomposition centres is a large core where bodies are gently decomposed among wood chips and sawdust.

Image by Katrina Spade for the Urban Death Project

The idea still has much to be fleshed out, well past just the design. This type of sustainable service would require a complete overhaul of the way we think of death. For some, it would be an appealing concept in that our bodies are returned to a natural cycle and will be part of the Earth again. While others, especially those with differing views of afterlife or reincarnation, would be incredibly hard to convince that there is even an alternative to their burials and cremation.

It will be an incredibly hard task to market this idea and I’m interested to see what happens. Leave your own reactions in the comments!

For more info on the Urban Death Project click here.

Check out these articles on the Urban Death Project:

The Architect Who Wants to Redesign Being Dead (The Stranger)

What to do with our bodies after we die? (Huffington Post)