From hair to there: Salon recycles clippings

Helen LeBeau has been cutting hair for 28 years. And LeBeau, of Aurora, swept up that hair and threw it away for about 27 of those years until she heard about the innovative practice of recycling hair clippings into hair mats for oil spills.

It was a year ago when one of LeBeau's customers at Tres Chic Salon in Hinckley told LeBeau about the Hair for Oil Spills Program conducted by the Matter of Trust organization in San Francisco.

The program takes hair clippings and uses them to create hair mats that sop up oil from environmentally hazardous oil spills. Hair cuticles are great for soaking up oil, an Alabama hairstylist discovered in the early 1990s. According to Lisa Gautier, who runs the organization, a pound of hair can drink up one quart of oil in a minute, and hair mats can be wrung out and reused up to 100 times.

In 2007, the hair mats effectively helped to clean up the Cosco Busan oil spill off the coast of San Francisco, which got the idea noticed and increased salon participation in the program by thousands.

The salon at 131 E. Lincoln Hwy. signed up to participate in the program through its Web site at www.matteroftrust.org and at www.excessaccess.com, the Web site for Excess Access, a database that links surplus with needs.

It is free to sign up with the program and informational posters for display can be purchased through Matter of Trust for $15.

Salons pay to ship the boxes of hair clippings, which are usually sent in a reused shampoo box. Until last year, the boxes were sent to a carpet-recycling warehouse in San Francisco, but the business shuttered in May as the recession became more severe.

Matter of Trust is now asking that salons refrain from sending any more saved hair clippings until a new, donated warehouse becomes available. Gautier's surplus of hair was recently written about in the Wall Street Journal and it was noted that Gautier is renting three semitrucks at a truck lot to serve as makeshift storage facilities for the abundance of locks.

Meanwhile, LeBeau and her two partners, Robin Chuk and Jodi Smith, are still collecting the hair as it lands on the floor of their salon in hopes that they'll have an address to send the boxes of hair clippings to soon.

Gautier said a manufacturing company on the East Coast recently made a trial run of the hair mats to see if they could accommodate the project. The company's machines are quite delicate, so she is uncertain if they will be able to take on the task.

When the program is up and running again, LeBeau hopes that other salons in the area will sign on. Part of the campaign is getting the word out, she said.

"Our clients are really excited to know that their cut hair is not adding to piles of waste," LeBeau said. "This way, everybody is able to contribute," she said.