Here’s an amazing idea, and it came from watching sea otters suffering in the 1989 Valdez oil spill! Phil McCory, a hair stylist in Huntsville, Alabama, noticed while watching reports on the environmental impact of the oil spill that the otters’ dense fur sucked up the oil and held on to it. That got him wondering whether human hair would do the same thing, so he set up an experiment using hair cuttings from his salon, a pair of his wife’s pantyhose and his son’s paddling pool to see whether he could remove oil from water using human hair. Miraculously, it worked, and the OttiMat™ was born.

NASA Testing

His idea caught the attention of NASA, and they set up their own experiment using hair from McCory’s salon and a 55 gallon drum setup with a hair mesh filter. 300 pounds of oil-water mix was poured through the human hair filter, and after a single pass (taking almost quarter of an hour), the water tested. A mere 17 parts of oil per million remained; just 2ppm above the EPA standard for discharge.

Reuse and Recycle

Even more amazing, since the hair doesn’t absorb the oil (it remains on the surface), it can actually be recovered from an oil soaked hair mat. Once soaked in oil, the mat can be wrung out and reused, and as much as 98% of the spilled oil can be recovered too. And all of that from something made of waste hair from salons that would normally have been thrown away.

This very technology was used recently right here in the San Francisco bay area to mop up some of the oil spilled from the Cosco Busan container ship when it struck one of the supports of the Bay Bridge on a foggy morning, ripping open one of its fuel bunkers and spilling 58,000 gallons of oil into the bay. In the photo (from Matter of Trust), Byron Cleary holds up oil soaked hairmat.

Tags: cleanup, cosco busan, hair, mccory, nasa, oil, ottimat, spill

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