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Recession Cuts Operation That Uses Hair To Clean Up Oil
Matter of Trust, a nonprofit that uses human hair scraps to make mats to clean up oil spills, finds itself with 18,000 pounds of hair and nobody to process it. Lisa Gautier, who runs the organization, says that the recession has closed many of the textile makers that produced the mats and the warehouse that stored them. Unfortunately for Lisa the hair keeps piling up. From the article: "Hair is good at soaking up oil because, up close, the strands are shaped like a palm tree with scalelike cuticles. Drops of oil naturally cling inside those cuticles, says Blair Blacker, chief executive of the World Response Group. A pound of hair can pick up one quart of oil in a minute, and it can be wrung out and reused up to 100 times, Mrs. Gautier says."
My back is more than hairy enough. Just dunk me in, problem solved.
Signed,
CmdrTaco
Well, you know the rest.
Just dump it all in the Gulf of Mexico... it couldn't hurt!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
could get a little hairy.
Clearly, this shouldn't be considered if it doesn't provide a comprehensive solution to the problem. It's the same reason we shouldn't be expanding solar, wind, and nuclear power generation in unison...we should definitely wait for just one technology that will serve all our needs, and not attack issues with a multi-pronged approach.
dragée (n): a sugarcoated nut
I'm trying to imagine this. I doubt there is automated equipment to do it and doing it by hand would be super nasty. I'm guessing that the quart per pound of hair is in ideal circumstances such as the mat being submerged in pure oil. Throwing a mat into the ocean would probably soak up more water than oil and then sink. Then you would have a bunch of dolphins with greasy toupees.
1. Talk to L'eggs - acquire off-style hose (save eggs for next years' Easter Bunny Motherlode)
2. Employ otherwise unoccupied Cajuns - capitalize on their andouille skills
3. Deploy Mega-Links of hair sausages off the coast
4. Retrieve, and press with hydraulic press - reclaim watery crude
5. Repeat.
No profit readily apparent.
Not to mention the day we talked about sarcasm.
Except then I'd be allergic to the ocean you inconsiderate clod.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Maybe I should rephrase my question. What's so gross about using hair to soak up oil?
As an interesting aside, there are things having sex in your eyebrows right this moment.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Someone missed the day when we talked about diversification and risk....
Someone definitely missed something...
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
The thousand and two use for a dead cat.
If we use those hair mats, not only will we have an oil spill, we'll have a greasy hair spill. The gulf coast would henceforth be known as Jersey Shore, South.