How Your Hair Can Save the World
Saving otters, birds and other marine life is all in a day’s work for many salons and beauty schools across the country. How can your salon or cosmetology school help care for our oceans and the creatures in it? By donating hair clippings to the Master of Trust program, Hair for Oil Spills!
As it turns out, hair is great at collecting oil out of the air and off of surfaces like the water. It’s adsorbent, meaning it clings to the pollutants (whereas absorbent means to soak up the pollutants). Participants in the Hair for Oil Spills program stuff loose, washed hair into nylon stockings. The stockings get made into “booms” which surround and soak up oil spills. Hair mats are also made for emergency oil spills and for oiled bird and mammal cages.
More than 370,000 hair salons in the United States collect about one pound of hair per day. (That’s 135 million pounds of hair per year for those who are keeping track.) The salons sweep up the hair clippings into plastic garbage bags, reuse the large boxes they get from shampoo deliveries and mail the hair.
Help your salon or beauty school help Planet Earth by joining this program. Find out more information and sign up for the Matter of Trust Hair for Oil Spills program here. It’s easy to help save our environment with excess hair. Besides, how can you resist the cute little otter guy?
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Tags: Beauty School General, cosmetology school, Eco-Friendly, go green, Green Beauty, green salon, marine life
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:26 am
[...] am indebted to Heather B on LinkedIn for drawing my attention to this blog post – http://www.beautyschool.com/blog/green-beauty/how-your-hair-can-save-the-world/ – which gives some details of a scheme whereby discarded hair from beauty salons is packed into [...]
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:07 am
Wow! Never thought about it. What a great and inexpensive way to take care of our enviroment. I am always looking for ways to improve my part of the world and now I can extend my help a bit further. Thanks for sharing.
June 4th, 2009 at 9:32 am
This is really interesting! This is an innovative idea that would really help save the wildlife in communities around the world! I will definitely be sharing this with my stylist! Thanks!
June 5th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Heather, I absolutely love your blog titles! They always grab me!
This blog post rocks, too!
Tori Allen
Brainchild Associates
http://www.brainchildassociates.com
June 22nd, 2009 at 9:23 am
Hey that is great. I love the hair as oil soaker upper! At the studio san francisco we did that since there were some recent spills in the bay. it’s cool when what we do helps out the bigger picture too!
September 17th, 2012 at 12:48 pm
[...] (typeof(addthis_share) == "undefined"){ addthis_share = [];}Ok, remember our “How Your Hair Can Save the World” article from about a year ago? Now is your chance to be a superhero and do your part to save the [...]