In 1998, Lisa Gauthier and her partner Patrice Gauthier founded Matter of Trust in hopes of solving environmental problems. They soon met Alabama hairdresser Phillip McCrory, who came up with the idea of ​​using fur pads to clean up oil spills after seeing an otter rescued from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska with its fur covered in oil.
McCrory tested his theory at home, stuffing five pounds of salon hair into his wife’s pantyhose and building a kiddie pool in the backyard. A million-dollar idea was born. Hair has the unique ability to soak up oil rather than absorb it. When hair comes into contact with oil, the oil molecules stick to the surface of the hair, forming a film that holds it in place. Just dive in!
Three years later, the idea was tested on a larger scale when a tanker ran aground in the Galapagos Islands. Matter of Trust helped clean up the mess with their felt mats.
It takes just 1.1 pounds of hair to make a two-square-foot, one-inch-thick pad that can hold about 1.5 gallons of oil. With about a million licensed hair salons in the U.S. generating about a pound of hair waste every day, there’s no shortage of materials. In fact, the company gets most of its materials through donations from hair salons and barbershops. “I can always tell when we get a package from L.A. — blonde, blonde, blonde!” Lisa jokes. Matter of Trust has received donations from every zip code in the United States.
The team uses not only human hair, but also other fiber waste such as wool, pet hair, and even dryer lint. They developed their own felting machine specifically for making 2×2 square rugs.
Matter of Trust has made more than 300,000 oil booms and 40,000 felt mats for major disaster relief projects, including the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. About half of its supplies are purchased by organizations like the U.S. Department of Defense, and the other half are donated, typically to volunteers, Gauthier says. Just one quart of oil that gets into a water supply can contaminate up to 1 million gallons of drinking water.
The standard method for cleaning up oil spills at sea or on land is to use polypropylene booms, but polypropylene is a non-biodegradable plastic that ends up in landfills. Keep in mind that the hair pads themselves are not an ideal solution. The only way to dispose of them is by composting or burning them. Both options have their drawbacks, but the team is working on figuring out how to extract the oils from the hair and make the pads reusable. Maybe a healthy dose of suds, rinse, and repeat is the answer?
Watch the video from Matter of Trust to see exactly how and what they do, and then decide if you’re disgusted… or not!