Lisa Gauthier receives about a dozen packages of hair every day. This might be a little disconcerting to most people, but Gauthier knows that all that blonde, dark brown, and every other shade of hair will eventually turn into something wonderfully “green.”
Gauthier, who founded the San Francisco-based nonprofit Matter of Trust, uses donated hair to make pads to absorb oil spills on land and booms (long pipes) to collect oil spills at sea.
The standard method for cleaning up oil spills is to use polypropylene mats. However, polypropylene is a non-biodegradable plastic, and its production ultimately means more oil drilling.
Hair, on the other hand, is a green resource and can absorb about five times its own weight in oil, according to Matter of Trust. While hair doesn’t grow on trees, there’s plenty of it out there. “There are about 900,000 licensed hair salons in the United States,” Gauthier said, “and each salon can easily cut about a pound of hair per week.”
“Our project is aimed at keeping this oil out of landfills,” she added. “It makes more sense to clean up an oil spill using renewable natural resources than to extract more oil to clean it up.”
Oil spills can contaminate drinking water, harm public health, damage plants and wildlife, and harm the economy.
In 2021, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recorded 175 oil spills at sea and on land in the United States alone. Worldwide, tanker spills release about 10,000 tons of oil into the environment. Just one quart of oil entering a water supply can contaminate 1 million gallons of drinking water, according to Matter of Trust.
This year, major oil spills have occurred in Thailand and Peru, with more than 513,000 gallons of oil spilled.
Gauthier says the oil spills that make headlines account for only 5 percent of global oil pollution. More common, but still damaging to the environment, are vehicle spills and natural seeps underground and along the seabed.
In 1998, Gauthier and his partner Patrice Gauthier founded Matter of Trust to address a range of environmental issues. Three years later, a tanker ran aground on San Cristobal Island, one of the Galapagos Islands. Wanting to help clean up, the Gauthiers teamed up with Alabama hairstylist Philip McCrory.
In 1989, McCrory developed a prototype device that used hair to absorb oil. The device was tested by NASA and showed good results. Matter of Trust and McCrory collaborated to create barriers and mats made from human and animal hair.
Every day, salons, groomers, and individuals send clippings to the Matter of Trust warehouse in San Francisco. At the warehouse, the packages are checked for contaminants like dirt, mud, or lice, then the hairs are separated, placed on a frame, and run through a specially made machine to make felt pads.
It takes 500 grams of hair to create a mat that is two square feet and one inch thick and can hold up to 1.5 gallons (5.6 liters) of oil.
Much of Matter of Trust’s cleanup work is on land, repairing damage to coastal areas caused by oil spills on land or in the ocean. The company says about half of its products are purchased by organizations like the U.S. Air Force and government departments, while the other half comes from donations, often in the form of volunteer cleanup workers from Matter of Trust.
Matter of Trust has produced more than 300,000 booms and more than 40,000 felt sheets for major cleanups, including the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, as well as a variety of other non-emergency spill response products, including stormwater cleanup and absorbing oil spills from vehicles and equipment, Gauthier said.
Megan Murray is an environmental biologist and Associate Dean of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. She works on developing sustainable oil spill response technologies. Her research involves using human hair as an absorbent – ​​a material that can be used to recycle liquids.
One of the main problems we face now with oil spills, she said, is that widely used polypropylene products end up in landfills.
“The problem that existed in a vulnerable environment has moved to another environment, and now another part of the world is infected,” she explained.
Murray’s research has shown that human hair is not only biodegradable, but is often as effective as polypropylene, and in some cases even better.
“Hair mats are great for soaking up spills on land,” Murray said, but added that when crude oil spills on a beach, it’s difficult to soak up with any of the materials she tested, including human hair and polypropylene.
Another benefit of hair is that it is cheaper than traditional materials and “is recyclable all over the world,” she said. “That’s really exciting because this material can benefit groups that can’t afford more expensive mass-produced products.”
Murray cautions that felt is not an ideal solution as it is disposable and can only be disposed of by burning or composting, which is not suitable for growing food. She is currently working on a method to extract oil from used felt, which would allow both materials to be reused.
Matter of Trust is expanding its network of local partner centers that produce rugs from local hair in 17 countries around the world, including Finland, Japan, Chile and Rwanda. Gauthier noted that individual centers are able to maintain a profit while also providing small funding to support the broader program.
Because the designs were not patented, other groups began producing their own caps and holders, such as the Green Salon Collective in the UK, which works to make the hairdressing industry more environmentally friendly.
Gauthier is happy to see the sport continue to grow. “Anyone can make a hair mat,” she said. “It creates green jobs, cleans up water, reduces landfill waste and promotes the use of renewable resources.”
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