Hair and 'Shrooms to Clean Beaches
by Jeremy Elton Jacquot, Los Angeles on 11.20.07
Hair and mushrooms probably aren't the first things to come to mind when you're preparing to clean up an oil spill. Yet that's exactly what a team of volunteers is using to mop up the errant oil slicks that have washed up on beaches around San Francisco Bay.
Lisa Gautier, who provided the volunteers with 1,000 hair mats, explained that hair acts as a sponge, naturally absorbing the oil from both air and water. She runs Matter of Trust, a nonprofit that matches businesses' donations to smaller, needy nonprofits; her organization makes money in part by collecting human hair from local salons, sending them to Georgia to be woven into mats before selling them to the SF Department of the Environment to soak up used motor oil.
So where exactly do the mushrooms factor in? Once the hair mats have absorbed the oil, oyster mushrooms begin to grow on the mats, consuming the viscous substance. After the mushrooms have finished absorbing all the oil - a process that takes about 12 weeks - the hair mats can be reused as nontoxic compost.
The hair mats have already been put to good use by over 700 volunteers. Gautier is hoping her hair mats will catch on; she has already contacted a Chinese company that specializes in industrial-sized hair mats about providing her with more and is considering making larger sea booms by stuffing hair into nylon stockings (how's that for creative).
It's always nice to see people use their heads - hair and all.
Via ::San Francisco Chronicle: Hair and mushrooms create a recipe for cleaning up oily beaches (newspaper), ::Inhabitat: CLEANING UP AN OIL SPILL WITH HAIR AND MUSHROOMS? (blog)
See also: ::58000 Gallons of Oil Spill into San Francisco Bay, ::Oil Spill in Black Sea Strait Could Be Region's Worst Environmental Disaster
I think I read back during the Valdez oil spill that hair stuffed in nylon works to absorb oil.
wow that is cool! talk about innovation collaborating with invention!
wow truly amazing. i just hate that we need something like that...but very grateful that Ms. Gautier had that ah-ha moment.
I heard about this years ago, through a Google marathon session to 'recycle hair'. It was on, like, results page 40 or something. The program sounds great, because EVERYONE can donate hair towards this, unlike like wig programs, which require at least ten inches.
The only thing is, if I remember correctly, it costs ten dollars to donate! It is a one-time fee for a salon to register before they can donate. Does anyone understand why it costs money to donate? Anyway, no salon in my area cares enough to pay to ship out hair, and I do not want to pay ten dollars so I can donate hair for oil spills. I think that cost is silly. Since I can not donate a cut to oil spills, I decided to grow out my hair, and donate it for a wig.
Oh noes! I just made myself a fool...
I checked their website, and it says that individuals can donate without a hitch. That's great! But if my memory serves me right, I truly remember them having a fee a few years ago...