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Here’s an innovative approach to ‘reduce, reuse, recycle.’ Hair stylist Phil McCrory noticed how quickly otters’ fur absorbed oil during the Exxon Valdez disaster. After testing how much oil clippings from his hair salon could absorb, he created the oil remediation mat, marketed as OttiMat. He discovered that a machine designed to make carpet pads worked well to make the hair mats. McCrory teamed with the environmentally-driven Matter of Trust and began production. These mats are used to clean up oil spills, including the one that deposited 58,000 gallons into the San Francisco Bay in 2007. They can be wrung out and reused many times, the oil being disposed of safely.

In addition, McCrory had been saving clippings for a while for clients who used the hair in their gardens. After seeing a four-year-old rose bush that had never bloomed grow 15 feet and sport a profusion of blossoms, Smart Grow was born. This can be used as a soil amendment, buried near the base of the plant, or as a mulch on top of the soil to deter weeds. Either (or both) of these reduces the use of chemical fertilizers and herbicides. Making plants healthier reduces their susceptibility to pests of all kinds (weeds, disease, insects, etc.), so you likely will cut down on your total pesticide applications overall. A Florida nursery tested the product on 200,000 container plants (half with, half without). In one weeding cycle, their results showed only 19,000 lb. of weeds in the plants with Smart Grow, as opposed to 88,000 lb of weeds in the ones without! The cost was nearly $33,000 more to manually weed the plants without Smart Grow, and even with all that weeding, more than 2000 lbs. of herbicide were applied.

According to one source, the Ottimats and Smart Grow products are sold through a parent company, World Response Group. WRG estimates that in the US alone, 60 million pounds of human hair go to landfills each year. Hair decomposes very slowly, so it stays there for quite some time. Not only human hair is diverted from landfills when used in McCrory’s products, though, according to a separate source which states that other natural fibres are accepted as well – dog fur from groomers, horse hair, waste wool, even nylon stockings that can be filled with hair and used to contain spills.

This is an inventive way to repurpose waste products, reducing landfill contributions by millions of pounds every year while providing an effective way to clean damaging oil spills (2600 worldwide last year, according to WRG).

To take it a step further, oyster mushrooms are now being used to consume the oil after it’s absorbed. Then the hair mats can be reused as nontoxic compost. To quote Jeremy Elton Jacquot of TreeHugger.com, “It’s always nice to see people use their heads – hair and all.”

(photo credit to www.matteroftrust.org)