Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Oil Spill Cleanup: From Hazmat to Hairmat

12/10/07 Catherine Girardeau, Earprint Productions HAIR MATS SCRIPT
TRT: 4:00

[AMBI, waves & sounds of volunteer command post at Ocean Beach: trucks idling, radios, footsteps]

Narrator: (0:21) On November 7th, the container ship Cosco Busan rammed the San Francisco Bay Bridge in heavy fog, spilling 58,000 gallons of fuel oil into the bay. Hundreds of volunteers turned out to clean the fouled beaches, including a group of eco-minded surfers and concerned residents who introduced an unusual clean-up tool: mats woven from human hair.

Reporter (field tape): (0:03) These are amazing. They look like Brillo pads.

Narrator: Why hair? It's ideal for absorbing oil from a beach, in part because of the scale-like structure of the outer hair shaft, which oil clings to but water does not. And volunteers say the sand shakes right off. Believe it or not, hair can turn cleanup into bioremediation, if you add the right ingredients. All this chemical collaboration needs is a jumpstart from well, fungus. But it all starts with the hair.

Narrator: (0:11) Phil McCrory, a Huntsville, Alabama barber, invented the hair mats after watching oil-soaked otters on the news in the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989.

Phil McCrory - World Response Group (0:23) I sweep up hair from my salon everyday, so I brought some hair home, put it in my wife's pantyhose, and virtually made myself a little otter, and created my own little oil spill in my backyard and was able to reclaim the oil. A gallon of oil soaked up out of the water in one minute, and the water was crystal clear, and the hair had saturated all the oil up and I was able to retrieve the oil and recover it and pour it back in the container I poured it out of.

Narrator: (0:30) On the clean-up's final day, McCrory stood in front of one of the Red Cross Tents at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, holding up a round hair mat about 7 inches across.

Phil McCrory - World Response Group (0:15)
This particular size here will recover one quart of oil in less than one minute. You centrifuge it out, recover that oil, and it can be used a 100 times. After it's centrifuged the last time, it can be burned in an incinerator. Hair leaves no residue when it?s burnt, it?s completely gone.

Narrator: (0:12) But sustainability organizer Lisa Gautier wanted more than safe disposal of the oil reclaimed from the Bay. She wanted to take it all the way from haz-mat to compost, and for that, she needed help -- fungal help. You may not want to think about this, but Keratin, the strong protein that hair is made of, makes hair an ideal seeding ground for fungus.

Lisa Gautier, Matter of Trust: (0:31) We are going to do this lasagna. We put down this straw which has a peroxide solution over it, and then we put down the oily hair mats and then this oyster mushroom spawn and we keep layering it all the up to a foot high and within 12 weeks we have compost which is certified for freeway landscaping compost and it?s no longer toxic.

Narrator: Is there a scientific basis for this technique? I asked an expert.

Dr. Terry Hazen: It?s a well-known technique in mycology to use what we call hair baiting ? where we actually put hair into Petri dishes to encourage fungi to grow.

Narrator: (0:05) Dr. Terry Hazen is a Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. He said the most important thing the mushrooms do is break down the stubborn molecular structures in oil residue, which allows them to be broken down further ? eventually into compost.

Dr. Terry Hazen: (0:14) Ring structures are basically carbon rings, So...the fungi. they actually will break the ring structures, which are some of the most recalcitrant parts of the molecule, and then make them more bioavialable to all the other bugs that are potentially there.

Narrator: As of mid December, Lisa Gautier?s hair mat lasagnas were in the early stages of stewing in their concrete pits at San Francisco's Presidio.

Dr. Hazen: (0:10) Certainly, the hair technique is very interesting, ... I would be very surprised if it doesn?t work quite well.

Narrator: (0:04) For Distillations, I'm Catherine Girardeau in San Francisco.

HOST BACK ANNOUNCE Catherine Girardeau (jeer-are-DOE) is a San Francisco-based writer and producer with Earprint Productions.

Web Links:

Matter of Trust, an ecological public charity focusing on Manmade Surplus, Natural Surplus and Eco-Education ? instigators of the hair mat oil cleanup in San Francisco
HYPERLINK "http://www.matteroftrust.org/"http://www.matteroftrust.org/ Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Ecology Division: HYPERLINK "http://www-esd.lbl.gov/ECO/"http://www-esd.lbl.gov/ECO/ Dr. Terry Hazen, Hazen Lab page: http://www-esd.lbl.gov/ECO/Hazenlab/index.htm