Human hair is an environmentally friendly resource
Lisa Gautier receives nearly a dozen parcels of human hair every day. This would be unnerving for most, but Gautier knows that the blonde and brunette locks, and all the other shades, will become something wonderfully “green.”
Her nonprofit based in San Francisco called Matter of Trust is s making special mats and booms (long tube-like products) using human hair and animal fur to help clean up oil spills.
A standard way to clean up oil on land is to use mats made from polypropylene, a non-biodegradable plastic. Hair, however, is an environmentally friendly resource that can soak up around five times its weight in oil. A single mat can absorb up to 1.5 gallons of oil.
“Our project is to divert this from landfill,” she adds. “It makes much more sense to use a renewable natural resource to clean up oil spills than it does to drill more oil to use to clean up.”
Oil spills can contaminate drinking water, endanger public health, harm plants, and wildlife, and damage the economy.
In 2021, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded 175 spill incidents at sea and on land in the US alone, and globally, around 10,000 metric tons of oil were lost to the environment from tanker spills. According to Matter of Trust, when just one quart (around a liter) of oil enters the water supply, 1 million gallons of drinking water can be contaminated.
According to Gautier, the spills that hit the headlines only make up 5% of global oil contamination. More common, but still damaging to the environment, are leaks from road vehicles and natural seeps from underground and up from the sea floor.
Matter of Trust has produced over 300,000 booms and more than 40,000 hair mats for major cleanups, including the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Matter of Trust is expanding its network of local partner hubs, which produce mats with locally sourced hair in 17 countries across the globe, including Finland, Japan, Chile, and Rwanda. Gautier says individual hubs keep profits above a small contribution to keeping the wider project going.
Gautier is pleased to see the movement growing. “Anyone can make a hair mat,” she says. “It creates green jobs, it cleans water, it reduces waste in landfill, and it’s promoting renewable resources.”
If you are interested in donating hair or fur to the cause, go online to matteroftrust.org.
Sources:
- https://youtu.be/k8fsVzyj-PA
- https://www.wect.com/2022/05/19/human-hair-animal-fur-is-being-used-clean-up-oil-spills-you-can-help/
- https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/19/world/oil-spills-human-hair-matter-of-trust-spc-scn-intl-c2e/index.html
- https://matteroftrust.org/
- https://us-east-2.console.aws.amazon.com/polly/home/SynthesizeSpeech
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