In an effort known as the Hair Recycle Project, a Belgian NGO by the name of Dung Dung uses human hair to absorb toxic pollutants.
Hair trimmings are gathered from hairdressers in the nation, and fed into a machine that creates matted squares used to absorb oil and other hydrocarbons that pollute the environment.
The Hair Recycle Project Can Be Used To Deal With Different Pollution Problems
The hairy mats are then put in drains to deal with flooding-related pollution issues or to absorb up pollution in water before it reaches a waterway.
Additionally, hair can be utilized to clean up oil spills and create bio-composite bags, according to Interesting Engineering.
As per the NGO, a single strand of hair can support up to 10 million times its own weight, and one kilogram of hair is capable of absorbing seven to eight liters of oil and hydrocarbons.
"Our products are all the more ethical as they are manufactured locally... they are not imported from the other side of the planet," according to project co-founder Patrick Janssen.
Shorter hair clippings have many other purposes in addition to being able to be donated if you have long, healthy hair for wig making.
Since hair is high in nitrogen, it can be used as a fertilizer for gardens, and several businesses are experimenting with using hair as a building material.
In fact, a facility at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, used waste hair collected from salon floors to grow crops in October, which included Chinese cabbage bok choy, microgreens, and leafy vegetables.
Additionally, the London-based biomanufacturing startup Biohm uses discarded human hair to create 3D items and substitutes for sheet material made of wood.
Even household goods with human hair rope were unveiled by Studio Sanne Visser during last year's London Design Week, Euronews Green writes.
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Human Hair Waste Is Creating Breakthroughs For Various Good Causes
The project collects hair trimmings from Isabelle Voulkidis, manager of the Helyode salon in Brussels, in exchange for a little donation to what she considers to be a worthwhile cause.
"What motivates me, personally, is that I find it a shame that hair is nowadays just thrown in the bin when I know that so much could be done with it," she states.
For a few years now, many efforts have been conducted to not only reduce the pollution caused by discarded human hair, but also to see how this waste can be recycled into something useful.
In June 2020, Australian researchers from QUT developed a remarkable new method that allowed human hair waste to be converted into flexible displays that could be utilized in smart gadgets.
According to Interesting Engineering, in this study, small hair strands were successfully converted into carbon nanodots, which are uniform, one-millionth-of-a-millimeter-wide dots.
With that, the same team created a "armor" that enhances the performance of solar technology in April 2021 using nanodots made from human hair.
The characteristics then were employed to improve the performance of perovskite solar cells, a more affordable and simple-to-manufacture new generation of solar technology.
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