Narrator: This machine weaves human hair to make mats.
And this nonprofit has been using them
for decades to help clean up oil spills.
Lisa: I'm going to show how fast it soaks up the oil,
how clear water pours off of it
and the hair holds the oil.
Narrator: One kilogram of hair can soak
up around five times its weight in oil.
Lisa: I'm just trying to get every nook and cranny here.
I mean, this is literally just the hair from your head.
Narrator: But for most cleanups,
oil companies use mats made from petroleum
or spray chemicals that can make people sick.
So if this method works,
why aren't more oil companies using it
to clean up their messes?
Lisa: Maybe the weirdness makes it
just more interesting. I don't know.
Narrator: We went to San Francisco
to see how hair mats can clean up worldwide waste.
Matter of Trust has been making hair mats
since the year 2000.
Founder Lisa Gautier sources hair
from salons in over 30 countries.
Lisa: We have what we call the hair force.
Narrator: The donated clippings arrive in small batches.
Lisa: People mail this in every day.
We get, I don't know, roughly 10 or so envelopes a day.
We get a lot of blondes.
We can always tell when we get a package from Los Angeles.
Like right away, blonde, blonde, blonde.
A lot of redheads in Boston.
This is probably from Boston.
We've been told that we got a package
of underarm hair from Michael Phelps
and the Olympic swimming team.
Narrator: The team also uses animal fur.
Lisa: Clippings from alpaca, buffalo,
sheep, etc. Llamas.
Narrator: Lisa and her team of felters
start by cleaning the bags of donations.
A lot of these were swept off the floors of hair salons.
Lisa: Pins, cigarettes, food, anything sharp,
anything hard that might break the needles,
all of that is garbage.
I don't find it gross at all.
I have a lot of hair, and it doesn't bother me.
It's part of the charm of it.
Narrator: The felters lay out the human hair
on this bed of dull nails
and start to layer it with animal fur and fleece.
Lisa: We had to learn that we needed to not use sharp nails
because it would start to slice the hair.
And David invented this for us,
and he created it so that this thing just lifts up,
and it's really easy for us to remove it afterwards.
Narrator: Then these machines tighten the fibers.
The final product looks and feels like a doormat.
Lisa: Feel how sturdy that is. It's really sturdy.
Narrator: The idea to use hair to clean oil spills
started in 1989 with Phil McCrory,
a hair stylist from Alabama.
Lisa: He was watching the Exxon Valdez oil spill
in William Sound, Alaska.
And on CNN, it was showing the otters covered in oil
and the water around them a little bit cleaner.
Narrator: Phil looked down at the oily head
of hair he was shampooing.
Lisa: And it just sort of snapped for him.
"You shampoo because hair collects oil.
I cut a pound of hair every couple of days.
All of this could be going to clean up oil spills."
Narrator: So 10 years after Phil came up with the idea,
Lisa partnered with him to scale up.
At first, they stuffed nylon stockings with hair
to make booms shaped like sausage.
Lisa: We're going to stop doing as many booms as we have
because they needed the nylons,
which was, again, plastic to hold them together.
And we're going to start doing more mats
because mats add surface area,
and so it just collects even more oil.
Narrator: That idea was put to the test in 2010
during the largest oil spill in American history.
BP's Deepwater Horizon spewed 4 million barrels
of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over three months.
And Lisa's team got a flood of donations.
Lisa: We just started to get in ponytails
from people just cutting it off.
And then, of course, it was spring,
and it was shearing season.
And turns out there's buffalo herds in the United States,
so there was a lot of fleece just coming at us
in trucks and mail trucks and everything.
It was fantastic and overwhelming.
We had 19 warehouses, about 100,000 square feet each,
from the Florida Keys all the way to Texas,
right on the water
because people were just so generous.
Narrator: Lisa says that a representative from BP
reached out to her about a partnership.
Insider asked BP about that,
but the company didn't get back to us.
In the end, the oil giant didn't deploy her hair booms.
NOAA, a governmental organization,
helped run the cleanup effort.
Scientists concluded that hair booms
weren't as effective at removing oil
as booms made with polypropylene, an oil derivative.
Charlie: The booms would get waterlogged
and get saturated in water,
become heavier than the water,
and sink in the water.
And then whatever oil they had on it sunk with it.
And recovery was very, very difficult
trying to get those back out of the environment.
You don't see that with the poly booms.
These polys do not absorb water like our hair does.
Narrator: BP instead tried to burn the oil off,
but the fires only covered a small percentage of the spill.
The company also sprayed dispersants
to dissolve the oil and push it toward the ocean floor,
where much of it remains today.
And those chemicals can make people sick.
But the consensus was that the oil
was less harmful at the bottom of the ocean
than washed up on shorelines.
Charlie: It's a trade-off.
Sometimes they use the word "net environmental benefit."
But it's not net plus,
it's net less bad.
Narrator: Still, locals along the coast
used Lisa's hair mats to protect their beaches.
Lisa: The EPA told us that our BP response
was the largest grassroots mobilization they had ever seen.
And I was out there in Mississippi,
Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida.
Narrator: Eventually, BP was able
to plug the leak on its own.
But Matter of Trust proved it could mobilize
thousands of people to address an epic catastrophe.
The number of large oil spills
has gone down in recent years,
but Matter of Trust is now focused
on a much more common problem:
motor oil that drips from cars on the road
and makes its way to the ocean.
Lisa: There's many ways that oil gets spilled.
And the way that we concentrate on is oil
that contaminates our waterways,
is actually just drips on the street
mixing with rainwater and getting into storm drains.
Narrator: And those drips add up
to over 180 million gallons per year.
That's 16 times the amount spilled
by the Exxon Valdez.
Another use for the hair mats?
The US Air Force is experimenting with them to manage chemical waste on its bases.
Lisa: They're doing a very large system
with contaminated water reservoirs.
And once the mats have done their job soaking up oil,
how does Matter of Trust plan to get rid of them?
Lisa: It actually can break down into compost.
It takes a really long time,
and it's not our No. 1 idea for the circular economy.
What we think is better
is if we have really clean incineration.
Narrator: Even as she grows her business,
Lisa wants to make sure her hair-mat process
remains an open-source technology.
Lisa: Phil McCrory had a patent, which expired.
And we all decided that it's everybody's hair,
and we're a public charity,
and we thought that it was best not to renew it.
And we just thought it's something
that should be offered to the world.
Narrator: She's shipped her machines
to more than a dozen partners around the world.
Lisa: We just had a really great meeting, a big Zoom meeting
with all of our partners around the world.
And everybody was super jazzed,
because I think we're just getting into that next level now
where we're looking at how to send out
more and more machines.
And we have one in London, one in Wales,
France; Switzerland; Finland;
Athens, Greece; Tokyo; Santiago, Chile.
Narrator: And she says it's possible
to do this work from home.
Lisa: For us, cottage industry is the future.
Anybody can make a little felted experiment
just by putting a bunch of hair and fur in your shoe
and walking around in it for a while.
The heat from your heels and the sweat
and the jostling from your shoe,
you pull it out and you will get a little mat.