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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."
actually I FAIL because I learned math in the us. you could lay down all 18,000 lbs and collect 4,500 gallons in an hour, making this an actually feasible total of 108k gallons per day, minus wring out time.
If you can deploy, gather, wring and redeploy in a several hour period (collecting 4,500 gallons each time), it seems like you could soak up a rather significant portion of the 100,000 gallons.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.