OttiMat Gives New Meaning to “Petro-head”

In case the previous blog entry about sitting on hair doesn’t do it for you, here is another solution for what to do with the 60 million tons of human hair that get dumped into landfills each year. OttiMat™ has taken the natural oil adsorbing properties of human hair to help clean up large oil spills in the oceans. Adsorbing, as opposed to “absorbing”, means the hair holds on to the oil without soaking it in making it easy to squeeze out the oil and immediately ready for reuse. It was successfully used in the last year’s oil spill in the San Francisco Bay area as pictured above. Although it seems like a daunting task, the hair mats made it possible for volunteers to quickly and effectively pick up blobs of oil that were washing up on shore without creating more hazardous waste.This product was developed by hair stylist Phil McCory in Huntsville, Alabama. He got the idea during the time of the Exxon Valdez Oil spill in 1989, after seeing how otter fur was retaining the oil. He realized that human hair had the same properties and conducted a test in his back yard with leftover hair from his salon and his wife’s stockings. This method proved to be so successful that NASA soon conducted their own test by pouring 300 pounds of oil and water mixture from a fuel oil spill through the hair filter. After one pass, the water showed 17 parts per million of oil were in the water, just 2 PPM above the EPA standard.

The possibilities for the use of this excess hair that most of us find disturbing goes beyond oil spills. It’s also been found that these mats can be used to fertilize crops and increase plant growth and are available for sale through SmartGrow.

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