A Hairy Solution for Crude Oil Spills
In 1989, Phillip McCrory watched a CNN story on the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Seeing the difficulty volunteers were having cleaning oil from the fur of otters, McCrory wondered if perhaps human hair could be used to soak up oil. His curiosity could revolutionize how we attack oil spills.
McCrory is a hairdresser who lives in Madison, Alabama. After seeing the oily otters on CNN, he brought a bag of hair home the next day. He stuffed an old pair of his wife Sherry's nylons with five pounds of hair, then tied the ankles together to make a ring. After he filled his son's plastic pool with water, he dumped in a gallon of used motor oil. He dunked the ring of hairy panty hose. "In two minutes, the water was crystal clear," he said recently over the phone from his salon.
Chicken feathers, wool, and straw are other natural substances used on oil spills, but hair seems to be more effective, said McCrory, who brought his discovery to researchers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in nearby Huntsville, Alabama.
The scientists did further tests: they filled a 55-gallon drum with 40 gallons of water and 15 gallons of oil. Another drum, which drained at the bottom, was stuffed with nylon bags full of hair. The drum with the oily water was poured into the drum with the hair. When the water flowed out the bottom, only 17 parts of oil per million parts of water remained, equal to about two drops of oil.
Hair does not absorb oil. Oil clings to hair in a process known as adsorption, in which the tiny scales on hair snag and hold oil. Maurice Hall, a NASA engineer working with McCrory, said hair adsorbs better than wool or feathers. The researchers are working with McCrory to develop quilted pillows of hair of various sizes. The current version being tested weighs just more than a pound and will adsorb a gallon of oil in two minutes, McCrory said.
The hair within the pillows can collect oil many times if it is properly wrung out, and the hair can eventually be burned as fuel, McCrory said. The hair, a renewable resource, could eventually replace polypropylene fibers now used to collect oil.
McCrory figures about 1.4 million pounds of hair could have snatched up the 11 million gallons of oil leaked by the Exxon Valdez. Hair supply, he explained, is not a problem. About 200,000 salons and barber shops exist in the U.S., and the floors of each gather about one pound of hair a day. He currently collects hair from 12 Alabama salons for the work with Marshall Space Flight Center and hopes to eventually keep mountains of hair out of landfills nationwide.
"Two-hundred thousand pounds of hair a day grows, no matter what El Nino's doing," he said. "It's the same crop, every day." McCrory received a patent for his idea and wants a company to buy his license and start making hair pillows once final tests at Marshall Space Flight Center are accomplished. If a large corporation isn't interested, he said he will develop the idea himself. He's done it before. McCrory, 52, has three patents, including one for a collapsible Christmas tree that hangs from the ceiling to prevent cats from knocking it over. "I don't look for these ideas," he said. "They just come up and find me."
