Hair mat madness – a ‘home grown’ solution for oil capture

Photo: Hair mat with oil, courtesy of Matter of Trust.

Picture a toupee in need of grooming that measures 1 ft x 1 ft x 1/3 inch-thick and you’ve got a good idea of what volunteers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area are using to clean up last week’s 58,000-gallon oil spill.

Some 2,000 of the 1/3-pound mats have been deployed by the San Francisco–based nonprofit Matter of Trust. Co-founder Lisa Gautier said by phone today that they have received calls from Russia and Mumbai, India, in recent days asking how to get, make, use and dispose of the mats.

Of course hair mats aren’t the only tools being employed in the clean up, but they’re certainly the coolest.

The mats of certified organic human hair (I’m not sure what you’d have to eat to grow non-organic hair) naturally adsorb oil – which is why we all wash our locks – and in the case of San Francisco’s bunker oil collect about one quart per mat. That means some 232,000 mats, and who knows how many heads, to sop up the container ship’s dirty, oily mess.

There’s a common misconception that hair “absorbs” oil as opposed to “adsorbing.” Absorbing suggests the hair becomes full of oil when in reality it becomes coated, thanks to the scaly, cracked nature of the dead cells that make up hair.

What IS one to do with 2,000, or in a nicer world 232,000, oily mats. Gautier said that if the objective is to reclaim the oil, the mats can be wrung out and used another 100 times. But SF's bunker oil needs to be discarded.

Matter of Trust has teamed up with Paul Stamets, founder of Fungi Perfecti, to seed the mats with fungi. Mycelium consumes the oil, and when it dies leaves behind mineral-rich soil, with a mass reduction of roughly 4:1. Let's say an oily hair mat weighed a pound, that means the 232,000 mats would biodegrade into 58,000 pounds of soil. Hmmm. I like it: a gallon of oil could equal a pound of soil.

Fungi Perfecti and Mycelium Running

Matter of Trust