Maria Madisson salon donates to nonprofit foundation Matter of Trust which upcycles hair, fur, and fleece
Remember learning in school that resourceful ancient civilizations used all available resources to perform vital societal functions and never discarded anything? It’s kind of the anthropological illustration of the old proverb that one must work with what he’s got.
That principle still holds today in the context of a local hair salon.
Yep — a hair salon.
“Customers notice my jar of used extensions and after they find out its purpose, when they come in to get new extensions installed they often bring old extensions they’re no longer using. One of my customers brought in a small suitcase full of hair!” said Alysha Daroy, proprietor of Maria Madisson, a hair extension salon that is popular with Malibu residents. “I am happy to donate the hair for good use — it’s so much better than throwing it away!”
Daroy notes that donating the hair is user-friendly — one need only mail the hair to Matter of Trust, a nonprofit organization, at its San Francisco headquarters.
Mats made from donated hair to soak up petro-chemical oil spills are stacked on a table at the Matter of Trust flagship factory in San Francisco. Photo Courtesy of Matter of Trust
Old hair discarded by pet groomers and veterinarians, hair clippings from local salons as well as hair extensions, and even laundry lint — all can be repurposed as mats that help soak up petro-chemical oil spills.
Yep, oil spills, including those in the ocean, such as when hair collected by Matter of Trust was used to help mitigate the damage caused by the 2021 Huntington Beach oil spill. The mats can also be helpful to collecting oil spilled in ports, airports, mining sites, and garages.
A Matter of Trust collects hair, animal fur, wool, fleece, and other fibers for sea mulch and seagrass restoration as well.
Here’s how it works:
“The hair mats for oil spills are felts, such as the material we all used in elementary school projects,” Matter of Trust President Lisa Gautier explained. “There are different scales of integrity in a textile and felt has low integrity as it can be pulled apart easily. The best way to think of the felts is that they’re like big fat hair dreadlocks that we make by putting the longer hairs into scrims that have shorter fibers sandwiched within them. We make some felt in-house at our headquarters and we have many partners all over the world who make the felt mats.”
Matter of Trust’s goals include mobilizing and celebrating practical, replicable, local-to-global systems that sort waste into resources. The organization is also focused on including youth as interns and helping teach school children about all of their efforts and all the possible eco-solutions to waste and pollution.
The science behind using hair mats to mitigate oil spills
There’s a lot of academic and oil and maritime industry scholarship establishing that hair, fleece, and fur are ideal sorbents. My personal favorite is titled “Use of hair mesh for oil spill management.” I like that one best because it is informative for laymen and also because it is published in the International Journal of Creative Research Thought. I was delighted to learn there is a journal of creative thought!
The article’s abstract clearly explains that among the environmentally friendly methods to clean up crude oil-contaminated water, human hair, being hydrophobic and a biosorbent, has proven to be an efficient material in removing oil from water with a maximum adsorption capacity of crude oil as well as its recovery and reusability. It can adsorb up to nine times its own weight! Wow! Further, hair is independent of external factors like temperature unlike other methods. Finally, since hair is just a waste product, it is a cost-effective method.
“Hair is also useful to help restore soil,” Gauthier said. “If one puts it on the ground, it will mossify and become smooth and then develop a microbial glossiness. It starts to felt all by itself, and mycelium fruits up, which attracts moths and, logically enough, animals are attracted as the moths are a food source. Soon, there is a blooming ecosystem where only unhealthy dirt was.”
I’m sold. So was Paul Newman.
Yep, Paul Newman: In 1998, his organization, Newman’s Own Foundation, kindly helped provide attorneys and start-up support for Gautier to establish Matter of Trust, whose mission is to link surplus, such as the hair, a naturally abundant material, and manmade excess materials with needs those resources can fulfill. Matter of Trust serves communities by practical, replicable, local-to-global systems that sort waste, such as hair, into resources. The organization also researches and showcases planet-friendly inspirations for households and workplaces with its eco-home and eco-industrial hubs.
“The Air Force started using the mulch we have made from fibers and their officials characterize it as a game changer.”Gautier said. “People reach out to us and want to also make felt mats — we send them a felting machine wherever in the world they are located — the main idea is to use local fiber for local solutions.
“We’re delighted that Alysha’s salon is donating hair — we currently have 30,000 of the 900,000 hair salons nationwide contributing to our causes. It doesn’t matter if the hair is dyed or chemically treated.”
As for Daroy, she aims to ultimately recycle 95 percent of her salon’s waste, including hair dyes.
At Matter of Trust, discarded items matter so they can be deployed to address environmental challenges that matter to us all.