Hairdressers do their job every day: they cut, color, wash and brush their clients’ hair. Once the actions that qualify beauty salons are finished, the floor turns into a field full of… waste.
But where is this waste put? What will happen to that pile of fiber?
For some time now, the hair that hairdressers have cut has been recycled to create wigs or even, in Japan, paint brushes.
The Hair Booms, nylon tubes filled with hair that absorb, as well as store the oil that pours into the seas.
With the aim of limiting environmental damage.
A concrete example was the MV Wakashio accident in 2020. As a result, more than 4,000 tons of oil spilled on the reef off Mauritius. They were collected from associated salons and sent thousands of tubes filled with hair, supporting with their absorbent abilities to stop the tide that was pouring on the country’s beaches.
The New Age of Trichology is Sanne Visser’s project.
The question Ms. Visser asked herself before starting her project was: “How can we reuse human hair waste to create new materials and design results?”. Hair that emits toxic gases into the air and that often ends up in landfills is harmful both to us, human beings, and to the environment. Having valuable properties, the latter must be exploited. So Vesser devised a way to recycle this important resource.
In France there are several associations that deal with hair recycling.
The hair, as already mentioned above, also has an absorbent property, and even the French associations use it.
Furthermore, the French associations also use hair as a fertilizer.