Recycled hair treats oil spills

WESTFIELD, Mass. (WWLP) - Tangles Hair Salon cuts for a cause. The locks that fall to the floor are swept up and shipped off.

Tangles, along with thousands of other salons across the nation, take part in Matter of Trust’s Hair for Oil Spills Program. The nonprofit organization constructs hairmats that soak up oil spills.

"It's helping the community, and it's doing something useful with the hair rather than just throwing it out," Louise Pilegi, the office manager at Tangles, told 22News on Wednesday.

From Westfield, the hair clippings are shipped to San Francisco, California. President and Executive Director of Matter of Trust, Lisa Gautier, accepts and the deliveries on the west coast.

This good program has run into a bit of bad luck.

The textile industry that created the hairmats for Gautier shut down. She has 18,000 pounds of hair sitting in storage. With nowhere to turn, Gautier faces a tough decision.

"The idea is to find a way, a prototype, in the next four months that makes me comfortable to keep the hair here in the U.S.," Gautier said on Wednesday.

Gautier is reaching out to the public in an effort to keep her operation in the U.S. She explained, “We need to find mechanical engineers to help us design and build a felting machine. Felting is a nonwoven textile. As opposed to woven textiles (like sweaters).”

“We want a machine that is about the size of school teacher's desk and
built like a VW bug -- as in easy to repair if necessary and lasts forever. If it's small we can have one of them at each of the cities with major harbors. And we can get them to developing countries where they also have plenty of hair and many, many abandoned oil spills.”

The clock is ticking. If a company or invention doesn’t come to the rescue, the hair cut at Tangles in Westfield, Massachusetts, may be on its way to Mexico.

The final destination of that hair, though, is an oil spill anywhere in the world.