Hair

Science Watch: Oil Spills? Ask a Hairdresser
June 9, 1998, New York Times

Cleaning up oil spills could turn out to be easy, if people just use their heads. Or at least their hair. It is an idea the space agency has field-tested - or ditch tested, to be exact. The idea came from Phillip McCrory, an Alabama hairdresser who, as he puts it, "walks around in the stuff all day" in his Huntsville salon. In 1989, McCrory saw television footage of an otter soaked in oil from the Exxon Valdez spill. "That's when the light went off," he said. If the otter's fur soaked up oil, would human hair do the same?

McCrory went straight to the experimental stage. He built a test otter by stuffing four pounds of human hair into a pair of tights, filled his son's wading pool with water, dumped a gallon of used motor oil on top and heaved in the hair. "In two minutes the water was crystal clear," he said. Tinkering gave way to figuring. How much hair is thrown out every day? If there are more than 200,000 salons in America, he figured, 200,000 pounds a day would be an extremely conservative figure. Then, some of McCrory's customers from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville put him in touch with Maurice Hale, a technology transfer expert. When some diesel oil spilled in a ditch at the center, McCrory made a rough filter - 16 pounds of hair in a barrel. When the tainted water was pumped through, it came out containing 17 parts per million of oil - clean enough to dump in a sewer.

The secret is that every hair shaft is covered with tiny cuticles - "like fish scales," McCrory said - that give the surface tension of oil, which cannot bind with water, something to cling to. Subsequent lab tests with Hale yielded the estimate that 1.4 million pounds of hair in re-usable mesh pillows could have soaked up the 11 million gallons spilled by the Exxon Valdez in about a week. By contrast, Exxon spent $2 billion on a lengthy cleanup that captured only about 12 percent of the spill.