The Gulf of Mexico may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you step into your local salon, but stylists, groomers, and anyone who just needs a haircut could help clean up the oil that’s flowing into the sea and washing up on beaches.
Beauticians and barbers who serve people and pets can donate the natural fibers to Matter of Trust, a San Francisco-based non-profit that collects hair and fur. (For information on where and how to send it, click here.) Volunteers can stuff the renewable material into nylons and use them to contain the slick. Amanda Richardson-Bacon, a gulf coast native, even organized Boom-B-Q parties, wrote The New York Times.
“It looks like a giant hair sausage,” she said in the article. “It’s very nasty looking.”
Used on a large scale after the 2007 Cosco Busan tanker oil spill in San Francisco Bay, hair mats effectively remove crude from sandy shores. “Within the first 72 hours these hair mats were just slurping up oil,” the group’s cofounder Lisa Gautier said to Audubon two years ago.
National Public Radio reported that BP currently has no plans to use the hair booms, which are adsorbent, meaning that the oil clings to the human, dog, and alpaca fibers instead of soaking into them, says the non-profit. Instead, the oil company will continue using the absorbent booms lining the shoreline.
Still, Matter of Trust is stockpiling donations at 19 warehouses in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. It's also working with local municipalities.
“There are over 320,000 hair salons in the US and each collects about 1 pound of hair a day. Right now, most of that goes into the waste stream, but it should all be made into hair mats,” Phil McCrory, a barber who came up with the idea, writes on the organization’s website. “Hair is very efficient at collecting oil out of the air, off surfaces like your skin and out of the water, even petroleum oil.”
So whether your hair (or your dog’s) is long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, or matty, think about sending it to Matter of Trust the next time you get it cut. Now that should make for lively conversation with your stylist.
 Booms filled with hair. Photo courtesy of Matter of Trust. |