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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."
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.
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.
could get a little hairy.
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.
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
In defiance of logic, our cats seem to shed several times their own volume in hair every week.
Using it to clean up oil spills would be more useful than having it decorate our carpets and furniture.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
If you think this massive oil spill didn't have to happen, well, you're right.
Oh, and BP bears responsibility for Exxon Valdez too.
http://www.gregpalast.com/slick-operator-the-bp-ive-known-too-well/?print=1
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
The article is from last year. I fould a later article that actually has information relevant to the recent oil spill here: http://www.wmtw.com/mostpopular/23473933/detail.html
The actual organization's website, which Slashdot fails to link to, is at http://www.matteroftrust.org/programs/hairmatsinfo.html
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.
Not like fishermen who live off the coast have much to do now that their livelihood is ruined. As of now, there should be a sizeable workforce down in New Orleans with the incentive to actually volunteer to clean up those waters, given that the weather permits them to do so.
Off topic, but that's why cyclists shave their legs. Not because of aerodynamic advantage (like with swimmers) but because when they crash (not if) it reduces their chance for infection in the road rash.
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Uh, no, they're not. BP is a British limited liability corporation, with stock sold on both the London and New York stock exchanges. Their 2009 annual report states that they made a profit of over $16.5 billion last year.
I just listened to a story on NPR with one of the head guys from Matter of Trust, and he mentioned nothing to this effect. In fact, he said there are warehouses all over the country helping store this, they use used stockings for the packaging, and from the sound if there are about 450,000 lbs of hair headed to the Gulf Coast right now. So who's right here? The guy on the radio sounded pretty calm, if not even stoked, about this whole thing, but TFA seems to say that Matter of Trust has no one and no way to help.
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.
'I doubt there is automated equipment to do it ...'
There is; it's called a mangle. There used to be manual, then motorised ones attached to the old, drum-type washing machines.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Not to mention the day we talked about sarcasm.
Doubtful.
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.
Except that you could use that 18,000 lbs of hair to soak up 18,000 quarts of oil in a minute... repeat every hour and soak up that 100,000 [gallons] per day...
Quarts, gallons, what's the difference? (Hint: one is four times as large as the other.)
Actually, now that I've done the maths... it would only require 16,667 quarts per hour of clean-up to keep pace with a 100,000 gallon per day leak (100,000 gallons = 400,000 quarts; 400,000 quarts divided by 24 hours = 16,666.6(repeating)). Therefore, 18,000 quarts per hour *would* be enough to get ahead of a 100,000 gallon per day leak, not only cleaning the new leakage, but also incrementally cleaning the existing mess. Of course, this assumes a constant rate of clean-up, with no room for inaccuracy/mishaps, no "half-soaked" hairs, 24 hours per day, etc. Assuming (not sure where the figure actually came from, quite possibly the linked article which I haven't read yet) that you could soak 18,000 quarts per minute, clean-up could be a snap - according to my maths, it would take less than 4 hours to clean up 100,000 gallons of spill using this method (in a perfect world).
Feel free to check my maths, I hold no illusions as to my perfection in any department.
Oh, and get these people some boats so they can deploy.
--
What is the difference between "in theory" and "in practice"?
Well... in theory, there isn't any.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
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.