Have you ever wondered what happens to all those curly, straight, red, blonde, black, brown hairs? While it might be the bain of every salon junior's live, if your salon (pet of human) is part of a recycling initiative, all that hair is recycled to a very good cause.
Human and pet hair collected from salons almost always ends up being turned into devices that soak up spilt oil. Oil spills at sea are well known environmental disasters. Lesser known are the hundreds of smaller spills in our streets and businesses.
Traditionally spilled oil on land was cleaned up using mats made from fossil fuel based polypropylene. But increasingly, rescued human and pet hair is turned into mats - which can soak up around five times their weight in oil. Hair is an abundant resource. You simply have to look on the floor of any hairdressing salon - or ask the newest apprentice, who seems to endlessly sweep the stuff up.
Sustainable Salons ask their member salons to separate hair into two groups. Long tresses are generally plaited before being cut and are then used to make wigs. These wigs are donated and invariably end up with people who have lost hair because of treatments like chemotherapy.
The other more common salon hair is the stuff on the floor. This hair is collected and turned into Oil Mats or Oil Booms. The mats are generally used on land and the booms - long tubes of hair are used for spills at sea. Booms for slicks at sea are much longer – it takes about 7 kilos of hair to make a 12 foot long boom, which might be laid along a coastline near a spill.
According to USA hair-mat makers, Matter of Trust, it takes 500 grams of hair to create a two-foot square, one-inch thick mat, which can collect up to 5.6 litres of oil. Most small suburban salons produce that much hair every week.
While hair is an excellent solution, it only solves one problem - the spill itself. Hair mats and booms are single use, and can only be disposed of by incineration or in landfill. More research needs to be done on methods to extract the oil from a used hair mat - meaning both the oil and mat could be reused. Megan Murray, an environmental biologist and associate head of the school of life sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, develops sustainable technologies to tackle oil spills:
“YOU’VE GOT A PROBLEM THAT WAS IN A VULNERABLE ENVIRONMENT JUST BEING MOVED TO ANOTHER ENVIRONMENT, AND NOW YOU’VE GOT ANOTHER PART OF THE WORLD THAT’S GOT CONTAMINATION IN IT.”
Ask your hairdresser or pet groomer if they are part of Sustainable Salons or if they recycle clipped hair. If they don't, encourage them to check out their options - or find someone who does recycle! In the UK, Green Salon Collective, in USA, Matter of Trust.