By : Franyi Sarmiento, Ph.D., Inspenet, July 13, 2022
In the late 1980s, Phillip McCrory, a stylist from Alabama, thought that skeins of hair could be used to absorb oil and designed a prototype that NASA scientists came to test.
Since then the proposal has been gaining strength and there are already several organizations that have decided to follow this trend. Perhaps the best known is the Matter of Trust, a non-profit organization founded in 1998 by Lisa and Patrice Gautier that has set out to harness a natural resource to eliminate oil spills.
Gautier now receives bundles of human and animal hair daily at his San Francisco workshop, where they turn it into absorbent mats.
Its pieces are used for both terrestrial and marine discharges. In fact, they were used in the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, which in the spring of 2010 caused one of the biggest environmental disasters in history in the Gulf of Mexico.
In the US alone, Matter of Trust calculates, there are 900,000 licensed beauty salons and each one can easily cut 450 grams of hair a week.
After a year, that means a huge amount of resources with a much more ecological origin than those usually used in landfills. One of the tools most often used to stop spills are polypropylene mats, a non-biodegradable plastic that requires oil drilling.
“It makes much more sense to use a renewable natural resource to clean up oil spills than to drill for more oil to use for cleanup,” Lisa Gautier told CNN. The benefit is double: they also manage to put tons of hair to use.
Its mats are used for large spills, but also for leaks on roads or subsoil leaks, much less visible than the Deepwater Horizon or Prestige tragedies; but with a caliber impact on nature.
“Think about it, you shampoo your hair because it absorbs oil, which means mats absorb oil and let water through. This makes our hair mats an eco-friendly and effective alternative to other methods,” they say. “By making these mats, we prevent hair from going into landfills and clogging drains, while preventing oil from polluting our oceans and waterways.”
Matter of Trust already has local partners in almost twenty countries around the world and it is not the only one that wants to solve hair spills. In the UK there is Green Wave, which also uses human and animal hair to absorb spills.
This material from the Xataka portal was edited for clarity, style and length.
Cover photo : ShutterStock
Internal photo : Matter of Trust
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