Discuss: Bad Hair Day

At last! A partial justification for the existence of human beings!!

Interesting. Know where I can get pics or further info on hair mats for clearing up oil spills? Is it really more economic to incinerate waste oil from a spill than to clean it up and find a use for it? And does the heat from the incinerator get put to any good use?

I notice that the discussion of the experiment in the Presidio forest doesn’t mention hair mats, though they figure prominently in paragraphs above and below. Was that an oversight, or were hair mats really not used there?

This is Great! But, why are they getting the hair from China? Fuels are being used to transport these mats of hair across half of the world!
Can’t they buy it or get it for free from hair salons in the U.S.?
I am sure many people would collect their clippings for free and send it if they had available stamped and addressed envelopes.

Great comments everyone, but didn’t anyone notice that the title of this article *should* have been “Good Hair Day?”

Here’s a link to Fungi Perfecti, Paul Stamets’ website, talking about some of the original work he did in discovering/proving the efficacy of mycelium in petrochemical remediation: http://www.fungi.com/mycotech/mycova.html

Look at the section entitled: Mycoremediation, about half-way down the page.

Iljas, I don’t think it’s economical at all to incinerate waste oil, particularly from a pollution perspective, but I also doubt that somehow cleaning it and re-using would be economical either.  The problems I see there are ones of particulate contamination (e.g., sand from beaches), as well as biohazard contamination (e.g., dead birds and sealife).

On the other hand, however, by using the hair mats impregnated with the oyster mushroom mycelia as a boom to contain the oil, or soak it up from beaches, you can completely break down the petrochemicals into non-toxic constituents, and then have a food product to boot - *AND* perhaps most importantly - accomplished in a matter of WEEKS…  It’s impossible to underestimate the profound implications and significance of that kind of turnaround.

Polly, I believe from my earlier reading of this situation that the hair mats were already being manufactured in China, and as the article notes, until after the spill there were no manufacturing plants here in the US.  I agree with you that particularly given current fuel pricing, importing these mats is in no way sustainable.  But what would it mean if every hair salon in the country recycled the vast volume of hair that right now they’re throwing away every single day?  It’s a perfect example of taking a waste product from one industry and using it as a resource in another - and gosh, I’ll bet there are some jobs for people associated with that transaction too!

It sounds as if the hair mats and mushrooms may be an innovative way of dealing with oil spills, anywhere.  Perhaps there will now be a new market for all the tonsorial leaving of barbershops and hair ssalons around the world?