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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."
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 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.