John Carlo Malici, owner of Brucecos Barbershop in Calapan City, Philippines, has collected more than two bags of hair from customers in the past 10 days. He’s not the only one doing it. Residents of the popular Philippine tourist islands of Palawan and Mindoro are rallying around in a variety of ways, including donating their hair, to help contain an oil spill that’s threatening the livelihoods of coastal communities just recovering from the economic recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Two weeks ago, an oil tanker capsized off the coast of Oriental Mindoro province, sending a slick of oil 100 miles into the waters of Palawan. Palawan, an island province made up of a thin strip of mainland and thousands of islets, is famous for its white beaches, popular with foreign tourists. UNESCO considers it the country’s “last ecological frontier.”
Andy Capones is a local rescuer with the El Nido Municipal Disaster Management Office. El Nido is a small city in the province of Palawan known for its biodiversity and tourist attractions. He told TIME that their office has received nearly a ton of donations, including hair from hair salons, as well as clothes and water bottles, all of which can be used to make homemade oil booms. Capones said the hair and clothes can be tied together and gathered together, and the bottles will help keep them afloat.
Although the oil spill has not yet reached El Nido, Capones is concerned that once it reaches the island, it will be a huge blow to the country’s economy, so he and other rescuers are preparing to do everything they can to stop the leak. “First and foremost, it affects our fishermen and our towns,” he said. “If the oil spill reaches our coast, the local tourism industry will come to a standstill.”
On February 28, a tanker carrying 800,000 liters of industrial oil sank in the waters of Oriental Mindoro at a depth of 400 meters. Most of the oil covered the northeastern coast of the province. By March 10, the black oil had reached the northeastern coast of Palawan.
At a Philippine Senate hearing on Tuesday, Dr. Cesar Villanoy of the University of the Philippines’ Institute of Marine Science said scientific models showed that local monsoons had limited the spread of the oil slick, but that the monsoons would end in a few weeks and could cause the oil spill to spread further.
The Philippine Civil Defense Office said on Tuesday that the oil spill had affected about 140,000 people in several towns, including about 13,600 fishermen. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources also said at least 21 marine protected areas were at risk and the oil spill could also affect about 2,200 hectares of coral reefs and 1,600 hectares of mangroves.
In response to the economic crisis caused by the epidemic, the Southeast Asian country of 110 million people said it hoped to attract 4.8 million tourists this year, but the oil spill has begun to hamper the planned economic recovery. Last week, Reuters reported that some tourists in Oriental Mindoro had cancelled their resort reservations because of the oil spill.
“We thought that after the pandemic, our fight would be over,” Jennifer Cruz, the mayor of Pola, one of the towns affected by the oil spill, told CNN Philippines. “Obviously not.”
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos has ordered the cleanup of the oil spill to be completed within four months. The Philippines has asked the US government for help, and Japan has also expressed its willingness to assist.
Fearing the impact on coastal businesses that depend on clean coastal waters, Filipinos have volunteered to help clean up the spill, using everything from buckets, coconut shells and even hair.
In fact, it has been scientifically proven that hair has the ability to remove oily waste due to its porosity and natural tendency to absorb oils.
“Hair is an absorbent, not an absorbent medium,” said Matter of Trust, a San Francisco-based organization that has been making oil-cleansing booms from human hair, pet hair, and wool since 2000. “Hair doesn’t expand like a sponge. Instead, the oil coats the entire surface of the hair, and because of its mass, it’s a very effective material.”
In 1989, Phillip McCrory, an Alabama hairdresser, first designed a prototype device that used hair to collect oil. NASA tested the technology and found it worked well. A 2018 study by researchers at the University of Technology Sydney found that booms made from untreated human hair were “significantly better” at collecting oil contaminants in water than other materials, such as cotton byproducts and cellulose.
This is not the first time hair has been collected to clean up oil waste in the Philippines: in 2006, a nationwide campaign even encouraged prisoners to shave their heads and chests to help clean up some 189,000 liters of industrial fuel in the central island province of Guimaras.
But not all hair is created equal. Dr. Irene Rodriguez, an associate professor at the Institute of Marine Sciences, cautioned that hair should be handled with care and then disposed of properly. “If the hair and oil remain in the environment, it will eventually cause problems,” she told TIME, adding that the same waste management practices should be applied to other traditional waste collection methods, such as rice husks and other biomass materials. “We welcome volunteerism,” Rodriguez said, “but we must always weigh the effort we put in.”
The Philippine Coast Guard said chemicals in the hair fragments Malici collected from Bruce Kos’s hair salon could further pollute the marine environment, so he had to suspend his donation efforts. But for now, he’s keeping the hair fragments in the hopes of finding another use for them. “I figured if there was something that could work or help with the oil spill, I could probably find another way,” he said.