Matter of Trust uses hair to clean-up oil spills

The San Francisco Institute of Esthetics and Cosmetology school and salon collects hair to help clean up oil spills. Your salon can participate, also; just ask them to contact Matter of Trust in San Francisco.

Matter of Trust, a non-profit organization, was started in 1998 by Lisa Craig Gautier and her husband, Patrice Gautier, an executive at Apple, Inc., to help match needs among non-profits working on environmental concerns.

When the Galapagos Islands experienced an oil spill in 2000, Ms. Gautier, disturbed by the lack of headway in the spill cleanup, decided to launch a hair for oil spills program patterned after an idea conceived by Phil McCrory, a hair stylist from Alabama.

In 1989, Mr. McCrory, shampooing a client’s hair while watching TV coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, noticed that the fur on the Alaskan otters was completely soaked with oil. Mr. McCrory realized that the hair he cuts that otherwise gets thrown away could be used to absorb oil from spills.

Mr. McCrory began testing how much petroleum oil he could collect with the hair clippings from his salon; he then assembled those clippings together in his invention, the “hairmat.” (The hairmat is a re-usable pad of hair that absorbs oil which is then also re-usable.)

Besides mats, Mr. McCrory had devised a “hairboom,” using his wife’s pantyhose to encase hair; the hairboom wound up looking like a giant sausage and it also was successful in absorbing oil.

For the next ten years, Matter of Trust partnered with Mr. McCrory’s company, Ottimat.com to collect hair and produce and distribute hair mats and hair booms to help with the yearly clean-up of 2,600 oil spills world-wide.

Collecting hair and using it to help clean up oil spills is productive on two levels.

In the U.S. alone, each year, 60 million pounds of human hair are disposed of in landfills. Mr. McCrory says, “Human hair does not degrade well; in fact, some samples have been found are thousands of years old. Using hair for bioremediation of oil spills would put it to work while simultaneously reducing the amount of waste in our landfills – a real win-win situation.”

Sorting donated hair, finding warehousing for the hair, making booms, obtaining mats, and fundraising have been monumental challenges for Matter of Trust. But, Lisa Gautier, her staff, and many volunteers are a dedicated, dynamic, creative group of people.

When the oil spill hit the Gulf, publicity catapulted Matter of Trust into the limelight, growing their business more in the last few weeks than it has in the previous twelve years.

Volunteers in the Gulf jumped on board with Matter of Trust to collect hair and hold “Boom-B-Qs” to learn how to make hairbooms. After much lobbying by people in the region, late in May, BP accepted the hairboom as a tool for oil retrieval.

Besides human hair, Matter of Trust collects hair from animal groomers, pet owners, wood and alpaca fleece farmers, and even from hairy individuals. To donate hair, time or money, contact Matter of Trust through their website, matteroftrust.org, email: team@matteroftrust.org , or telephone: 415.242.6041.

Lisa and Patrice Gautier are committed to a long-range plan for their business which is constantly evolving thanks to their requests for input from anyone interested. They say, “We hold a very optimistic view of the future, thanks to all of the ecological progress that we see. And we’re very fond of this lovely planet and respectfully consider her to be a Matter of Trust.”