Your Spare Hair Could Clean the Ocean!
What if a solution for cleaning our oceans was growing out of your head?
Well, those strands that cover the floor when you (or your pet) get a haircut could actually work towards saving the planet. So stick with us, we’re going to discover how this is already in action!
Skimming oil in the Gulf of Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill
Office of Response and Restoration // Flickr
The idea to use human hair to clean up oil spills came to hairdresser and innovator, Phillip McCrory, while he was watching footage from the 1989 oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. He noticed how the oil was attracted to the hair of animals surrounding the disaster; coating their fur and feathers.
This made him realize that he had a surplus of this material which he was just throwing out all willy-nilly after each of his clients’ cuts! So McCrory decided to do an experiment. He took a few pounds of hair, shoved it into a pair of his wife’s pantyhose and tested his hypothesis with used motor oil floating in a tub of water. Lo and behold, it worked!
These DIY booms soaked up the oil spills!
After having his neighbor, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, do their own testing of the hair booms in 1998, McCrory estimated that “25,000 pounds of hair in nylon collection bags may be sufficient to adsorb 170,000 gallons of spilled oil,” with one gallon of oil being adsorbed in less than two minutes. 1
Seems like an innovation someone would want to get behind, right? Well, 1999 rolled around and Lisa Gautier, co-founder and president of Matter of Trust, partnered with McCrory, and together they began Clean Wave.
Vox fills us in with all the details!
Sometimes, the solutions to our problems are right in front of us. Whether we choose to use them or not, well, that’s the issue.
My question is, why spend time, energy and money developing new products when we could just use our heads?
