Split Ends, Crude Beginnings
If you got a haircut this month, you watched someone sweep the results into a pile and then into the trash, and you almost certainly never thought about it again. Almost nobody does — it’s trash. Across the country that adds up to a daily mountain of keratin that goes straight to the dump. It isn’t recyclable in any ordinary sense and it isn’t compostable in any way most cities are set up to handle. It is the least interesting garbage in the building.
To most — but not to all. Because in 1989, a man in Alabama looked at that pile and saw the solution to a massive oil spill.
That March, the Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker, ran aground in Prince William Sound and put roughly 11 million gallons of crude into the water. Among the animals hit hardest were sea otters, which carry no blubber and depend entirely on their fur to stay warm and afloat. The result was tragic — an estimated 3,000 of them died, and people around the nation watched in horror was volunteers struggled to wash oil out of the fur of those otters at risk. Phillip McCrory, a hairdresser in Madison, Alabama, was one of the millions who saw those images on TV. And the picture stuck with him in a way it wouldn’t have stuck with most people. He knew hair, and had an idea.
He ran an experiment with what he had lying around. He swept five pounds of hair off his salon floor, stuffed it into a pair of his wife nylons, and knotted the ankles together to make a ring. Then he filled his son’s plastic wading pool, poured in a gallon of used motor oil, and dropped the ring in. As recounted in the Alaska Science Forum, the result was that “in two minutes, the water was crystal clear.” The oil hadn’t soaked in so much as latched on — hair adsorbs oil rather than absorbing it, as the environmental research group PERC explained at the time, meaning the oil films onto the surface without bonding. And that made McCrory’s discovery powerful — with his hair-and-nylon contraption, you could wring the oil out and use it again.
More testing was needed, of course, but the idea turned out to be right. Madison sits a short drive from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, which agreed to test McCrory’s idea in a controlled environment. The results were great. NASA’s own arithmetic held that 25,000 pounds of hair would take up 170,000 gallons of oil, at roughly two dollars a gallon against about ten for the conventional method.
McCrory filed a patent in October 1993 covering a floating, hair-filled sleeve, and it issued in September 1995. He sold the rights to a company called World Response Group and went to work there as an employee. Sales were flat, though, and the company pivoted to sell mats for gardeners who took advantage of the slow nitrogen release form the hair. The original idea — now called a “hair boom” — was activated by a San Francisco nonprofit named Matter of Trust.
As CNN later reported, Matter of Trust stepped in when disaster struck. When BP had a massive oil spill in 2010, public response to a spill captured not only the nation’s attention, but a lot of hair: salons ran cut-a-thons, volunteers in Alabama threw stuffing parties they nicknamed Boom B Qs, and by the organization’s own count, donors mailed in three-quarters of a million pounds of hair, fur and fleece from every zip code in North America and thirty other countries, filling nineteen donated warehouses from Florida to Texas. But amazingly, the hair didn’t actually get deployed. On May 21, of that year, BP turned down the offer. Speaking to reporters that week, BP’s Mark Salt said there was “currently no shortage” of the synthetic boom “and thus no need to consider the need for alternative products,” while Coast Guard spokesman Shawn Eggert cautioned that widespread use of hair booms “could exacerbate the debris problem.”
The effort to help continues, but the use of McCrory’s invention doesn’t get headlines — the big cleanups involve the synthetic stuff, as noted above. And if you have a lot of hair sitting around (or pet fur!), Matter of Trust is always accepting donations.
Bonus fact: Oil spills aren’t easily cleaned up with automated solutions, so it’s not uncommon for governments to call for volunteers when disaster strikes. And in some cases, people respond in droves. In 2007, a collision in South Korea created a massive spill, and per most estimates, over a million people showed up to help with disaster recovery. That’s approximately 2% of the entire population of South Korea.
From the Archives: BP’s Eerie Version of Battleship: Oil spills are no joke, but 40 years before BP’s massive one in the Gulf of Mexico, they kinda/sorta predicted one — via a board game