Lisa Gauthier and her partner Patrice Gauthier founded Matter of Trust in 1998 in hopes of solving environmental problems. They soon met Phillip McCrory, a hairdresser from Alabama. McCrory got the idea to use fur pads to clean up oil after seeing an otter rescued from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska with its fur covered in oil.
McCrory tested his theory at home. He stuffed five pounds of hair from the hair salon into his wife’s pantyhose and built a kiddie pool in the backyard. A million-dollar idea was born. Hair has a unique ability to attract, rather than absorb, oil. When hair comes into contact with oil, the oil molecules stick to the surface of the hair, forming a thin film that firmly soaks up the oil. Just a light dip in water is all it takes!
Three years later, the idea was tested on a larger scale when a tanker ran aground off the Galapagos Islands. Matter of Trust helped with the cleanup by donating its felt mats.
It takes just 1.1 pounds of hair to make a two-square-foot, one-inch-thick pad that can hold about 1.5 gallons of oil. With about a million licensed hair salons in the U.S. generating about a pound of hair waste every day, that’s plenty of material. In fact, the company gets most of its supplies as donations from hair salons and barbershops. “I can always tell the packages we get are from Los Angeles — blonde on blonde!” jokes Lisa. Matter of Trust receives donations from every zip code in the United States.
In addition to human hair, the team also used other waste fibers, such as wool, pet hair, and even dryer lint. They also developed a felting machine specifically for making 2×2 square rugs.
To date, Matter of Trust has made more than 300,000 oil booms and more than 40,000 felt mats for major disaster relief projects, including the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. About half of its supplies are purchased by agencies like the U.S. Department of Defense, Gauthier says, and the other half come from donations, usually to volunteers. Even if just one quart of oil leaks into a water supply, it can contaminate up to 1 million gallons of drinking water.
The standard method for cleaning up oil spills at sea or on land is to use polypropylene booms, but polypropylene is a non-biodegradable plastic and ends up in landfill. It’s important to note that these hair pads themselves are not an ideal solution. The only disposal options are composting or incineration. Both methods have their drawbacks, but the team is working on ways to extract the oils from the hair and create reusable pads. Could gentle soaping, rinsing, and reusing be the answer?
Watch the video from Matter of Trust to see exactly how and what they do, and then decide if you’re sick of it… or not!