Lisa Gauthier gets about a dozen strands of human hair every day. This might be a little disconcerting to most people, but Gauthier knows that these blondes, brunettes, and all other hair colors will turn into a wonderful “green.”
Gauthier founded the San Francisco-based nonprofit Matter of Trust, which turns donated hair into 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.
In contrast, hair is a green resource that can absorb about five times its own weight in oil, according to Matter of Trust, and while hair doesn’t grow on trees, it’s plentiful. “There are about 900,000 licensed hair salons in the United States,” Gauthier said. “They can easily cut about a pound of hair per family per week.”
“Our project is aimed at keeping this oil out of landfills,” she added. “It makes more sense to use renewable natural resources to clean up the spill than to extract more oil to clean it up.”
Oil spills can contaminate drinking water, harm public health, damage plants and wildlife, and disrupt the economy.
In 2021, NOAA recorded 175 oil spills at sea and on land in the United States alone, and globally, tanker spills released about 10,000 tons of oil into the environment. According to Matter of Trust, if just one quart (about one liter) of oil leaked into the water supply, 1 million gallons of drinking water could be contaminated.
This year, major oil spills have occurred in Thailand and Peru, with more than 513,000 gallons of oil spilled.
Gauthier said high-profile oil spills account for only 5% of global oil pollution. More common, but no less damaging to the environment, are spills from vehicles and natural leaks underground and along the seabed.
In 1998, Gauthier and her partner Patrice Gauthier founded Matter of Trust to address a range of environmental issues. Three years later, when an oil tanker ran aground on San Cristobal Island in the Galapagos, the Gauthiers were eager to help clean up the area, so they teamed up with Alabama hairstylist Philip McCrory.
In 1989, McCrory developed a prototype device that used hair to absorb fat. The device was tested by NASA and found to be effective. Matter of Trust and McCrory collaborated to create barriers and mats made from human and animal hair.
Every day, salons, groomers, and individuals send their clippings to the Matter of Trust warehouse in San Francisco. At the warehouse, the packages are checked for contaminants like dirt, dust, or lice, then the wool is separated and laid out on frames, then fed through a specially made felting machine to form mats.
It takes 500 grams of hair to create a mat two square feet in area and one inch thick, which can collect up to 1.5 gallons (5.6 liters) of fat.
Much of the cleanup work carried out by Matter of Trust is on land, either dealing with spills on land or repairing damage to the coast from marine spills. The company says that about half of its products are purchased by organisations such as the US Air Force and government departments, while the other half are donated, often to Matter of Trust volunteers who do the cleanups.
According to Gauthier, Matter of Trust has produced more than 300,000 booms and more than 40,000 felt sheets for major cleanups, including BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, as well as numerous other non-emergency spill response operations for a wide range of applications, from cleaning storm drains to absorbing oil slicks from vehicles and equipment.
Megan Murray is an environmental biologist and Associate Dean of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, where she develops sustainable oil spill response technologies. Her research includes absorbents made from human hair, a material that could 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 was originally in a vulnerable environment and now it has moved to another environment, causing contamination in another part of the world,” 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 is great for absorbing spills on land,” Murray said. But she added that when crude oil spills on a beach, it’s extremely difficult for any material she tested, including human hair and polypropylene, to absorb.
Another benefit of hair is that it is cheaper than traditional materials and “is available worldwide as a recyclable material,” she said. “That’s really exciting because this material can benefit communities that can’t afford more expensive mass-produced products.”
Murray cautioned that felt was not an ideal solution because it was disposable and could only be disposed of by burning or composting, and the soil was unsuitable for growing food. She is now working on a method to extract oil from used felt, allowing both 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 the profits from individual centers outweigh the small contributions needed to keep the program running.
Because the designs are not patented, other organizations have begun producing their own caps and holders, such as the UK-based Green Salon Collective, 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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