In 2006 50,000 gallons of industrial fuel leaked from a tanker when it sank off the central island of Guimaras, which is next to the Philippines.
This affected over 40,000 people and 120 miles of coastline, forcing families to flee because of the overwhelming stench and high levels of hydrogen sulfide (which can poison the central nervous system), benzene (can damage bone marrow and lead to anemia) and toluene (can lead to respiratory problems).
So what did the people of the Philippines use to clean up the oil spill? Human hair!
And what better place to get hair from humans who don’t really need it than a maximum security prison.
Over 15,000 inmates at a prison in Manila shaved their heads and their chests to donate hair to the oil spill cause. One prisoner who was convicted for drug smuggling said, “This is a contribution even though it’s a small part.”
Along with the prisoners about 500 hair salons in metropolitan Manila collected hair clippings from their shops with a goal of producing over 100,000 bags of hair.
So how did the whole hair idea come about?
Phil McCrory, a hairdresser from Alabama, was watching coverage of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil when he saw an otter whose fur was saturated with oil. He then wondered if hair could somehow clean up the oil.
Here’s the best part: He took five pounds of hair, shoved it in his wife’s pantyhose and put it in a wading pool with some oil. The hair didn’t exactly soak up the oil, but the tiny oil particles clung to the hair shafts rather nicely.
Thus, with the help of some scientists and NASA engineers, they concluded that hair could indeed help clean up oil.
Besides human hair, chicken feathers have also been used to clean up oil, but the feathers rot and give off an unpleasant spell.
Here’s the whole story from MSNBC.
This really is a super green idea, and unless a rare disease befalls the human race and we all lose our hair, we will always have a natural product to help clean up the oil.
We just have to make sure that certain people who make drastic hair changes save their hair for matters like the above instead of selling it on eBay. I won’t use names, but pictures will do just fine.
