Oil spill cleanup goes low tech with hair booms

Had a hair cut recently? The clippings on the floor of hair salons, barber shops and pet groomers are being used to create a low-tech tool for cleaning up the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Since hair and fur absorb oil, volunteers stuff these clippings into donated pantyhose to make large sponge-like mats known as booms. You can see how this works in the YouTube video above, or by clicking here.

Matter of Trust, a San Francisco environmental non-profit that has used these absorbent booms to clean up oil spills since 1998, says it's received donations from all U.S. states and several countries that amount to hundreds of thousands of pounds of hair. It also accepts washed nylon pantyhose, even with small runs or tears.

In Gulf Coast cities, the group says volunteers are hosting Bar B Q parties, which they call "Boom B Q's," to assemble booms in their backyards. It says other "hair-raising" events include "Cut-a-thons" and "Shave-a-thons" to collect donations.

"For past spills such as the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, these simple booms have been highly effective and efficient at cleaning up oil," says Lisa Craig Gautier, Matter of Trust's co-founder. She says a pound of hair can absorb one quart of oil in one minute, and hair mats can be wrung out and reused up to 100 times.

She says her group is coordinating thousands of volunteers and directing donations to temporary warehouse space along the Gulf Coast.

Hair booms reflect the largely low-tech measures that are still being used to clean up oil spills.

These methods haven't kept with technological changes, The Washington Post  reports today. In 1969, when people still used manual typewriters and rotary telephones, it says people attacked oil washing ashore from a spill near Santa Barbara, Calif., by skimming it off the surface, dispersing it with chemicals, and soaking it up with straw and other materials. The story adds:

Forty-one years and many generations of technology later, BP is attacking the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico with techniques similar to those used in Santa Barbara. And just as in those days, choppy water and strong winds can make it impossible to use those tools to bottle up oil once it has leaked into open seas.

"Taking proper care of the oil and then the pollution is damn near the same as what we see today," said Robert G. Bea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley who spent 16 years working for Shell Oil. "We're still chasing it around with Scott towels."...

"From the mid-'80s, it is the same thing," said Lois Epstein, an Alaska-based engineering and policy consultant to nonprofit conservation organizations. "At the time of the Valdez spill, we were utilizing booming and dispersants and controlled burns -- the same three major techniques as now."

The reason little has changed, said Byron W. King, an energy analyst at Agora Financial, is a "failure of imagination."

"The industry says it never had a blowout," he said, and as a result the oil "industry is not going to spend good money on problems that it says aren't there." But King said that "you need new technology to deal with the problems that your other new technology got you." And he said that the federal government, instead of just collecting its royalties, should have made sure that research took place.

The most visible tool for containing the oil slick is the long string of floating plastic booms. Half a million feet of booms are on hand and about half of them have been set out so far, but they work best in calm seas.