Ever go to a hair salon and finally get your long awaited haircut? Maybe you just needed a new look or your hair was getting too long. You go up the chair and the hair stylist starts clipping those dead ends. You finally get out of your chair and take off the cape they put on, and look down. Right underneath your shoes is a ton of your own hair laying on the ground staring right at you. But before you can really think too much of it, the hair gets swept up and put in a vacuum for it to be gone forever. Well, that hair either goes right into the trash, or in the ocean. Yes, the ocean. Unfortunately our ocean has been through a lot. For example, pollution, overfishing, coral reef bleaching, and the worst one yet oil spills. Oil spills are deadly to our marine life. Not only is it very difficult to clean up but whenever there's an oil spill, it’s always a big spill. It kills fur bearing animals, poisons the water, and is a bunch of gunk that will be coating everything. It’s horrible. Now, what does that have to do with salon hair clippings? Surprisingly a lot!
After a long day, ever touch your hair and it’s all greasy? That’s natural oil coming from your scalp. The reason why we need to shampoo our hair is because of how well human hair holds oil and soaks it up. Now this may seem like a problem to us, but not for environmental scientists. They figured out that human hair is actually really good for cleaning up oil spills. In fact once this was discovered hundreds of salons donated hair to help out. Even you can donate your own hair, all you have to do is look up how to donate hair for oil spills and multiple resources will pop up.
So how do scientists do this? Well, first they collect a bunch of hair and make hair mats out of them. These hair mats are composed of human hair compressed and stretched to make these very long and vast mats. These mats then get sent out into the ocean where the oil spills happen. From there, the hair will soak up the oil and be transported back to land. The best thing about using human hair is that it is a biodegradable material. The other way to clean up ocean spills is a synthetic plastic that soaks the oil up, the problem with these synthetic mats is that it is not biodegradable and therefore isn’t as “clean” as the hair mats.
Next time you see your hair getting long now you know where to donate it. Our oceans are not getting any cleaner if anything they just keep getting more polluted. That is 70% of our beautiful planet. There is always hope, environmental scientists keep creating climate friendly inventions. More people are aware of what is happening and are trying to stop it. Maybe one of those people could be you. So the next time you chop off your hair maybe you should put it towards saving a sea otter. You never know what a small step such as donating your hair could do for the better of our climate.
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