After a haircut, you don’t have to throw away the pile of hair on the floor. Instead, surprisingly, the hair can be used to prevent pollution from oil spills and leaks.
Matter of Trust is a San Francisco-based environmental nonprofit that collects hair from individuals and salons, as well as fur, wool, and fleece from groomers and farmers. All of this hair is used to make felt pads that absorb oil from wells, filtration systems, rivers, and even the ocean.
According to the organization’s website, it supplies waste to various felt pad manufacturers in the United States and other countries, who are actually responsible for producing the felt pads.
Surprisingly, hair is a powerful weapon in the fight against oil spills, as it has the amazing ability to absorb up to five times its own weight in oil. Additionally, wool mats placed in water act quickly, soaking up oil faster than the polypropylene booms most commonly used to clean up spills. But a word of warning: if the mat is used in water, it must be removed quickly, as there is no plastic inside to keep it buoyant, and it can become weighed down by rocks, seaweed, and other objects.
Hair mats can also be used inside storm drain guards to prevent oil from leaking from land into the water.
Matter of Trust President Lisa Craig Gauthier, who founded the organization in 1998 with her husband, Apple executive Patrice, explained in an interview that there is a large amount of hair that could be used to clean up the environment. She noted that there are about 900,000 licensed hair salons in the United States alone.
“During the pandemic, a lot of people weren’t going to salons, so we started getting hair that was longer than 4 inches [10 centimeters],” she said. “They would cut it themselves and send it to us.”
Add to that the surplus fiber produced by bison herds and alpaca farms, and there’s plenty of potential matting material. “It’s a renewable resource,” Gauthier said.
This is important because, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), thousands of oil spills occur in U.S. waters each year. While we typically only hear about large, catastrophic oil spills, many smaller spills also occur, such as when a ship is refueling, and these incidents can still cause a lot of damage, especially if they occur in sensitive environments like beaches, mangroves, and wetlands, according to NOAA.
There has also been a major oil spill on land. “Fifty percent of the oil that pollutes our waterways comes from small slicks on the streets that mix with rainwater and end up in our drains,” Gauthier said. While this is a concern, it is also an environmental hazard that can be addressed, as strategically placed mats can largely prevent oil runoff from entering waterways.
If you’re sending hair to Matter of Trust, make sure it’s usable. Gauthier advises always making sure the hair you donate is all natural, free of rubber bands, dust, pins, leaves, or anything else that could damage the hair-sorting equipment. She asks that the hair be placed in an envelope or box, not a plastic bag. Here’s a page where you can get more information about donating hair. Create an account here to donate.
“Education is really important because the most important thing is sorting the pollutants and waste in every recyclable resource,” Gauthier said.
Gauthier said the idea of ​​using hair to combat oil spills came to Alabama barber Phil McCrory, who was inspired by a 1989 television report on the Exxon Valdez oil spill. According to a 1998 CNN story about McCrory, he first experimented in his backyard, taking hair clippings from a barber shop, stuffing them into his wife’s pantyhose, and then dropping them into a shallow pool filled with oil. Within minutes, the water was clear again, according to the article. He then took his invention to NASA, where the oil-absorbing pantyhose underwent rigorous testing to ensure they worked. And they did.
In 2020, in solidarity with the environment, residents of the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius volunteered to cut their hair to help make wool mats that were used to collect and absorb oil leaking from a Japanese ship that ran aground on a coral reef, the BBC reports. One of the donors is Johanna Berenger, a member of the British Parliament. Here are more Petro Online reports on the event.
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