Lake Effect News

By LORRAINE SWANSON

Editor

Groomers spiff up a client at the Bark Bark Club. The Edgewater pet salon is donating the hair of its clients and collecting donations of nylons that will be used to make hair booms to help clean up the BP oil spill along the Gulf Coast.

Bark Bark Club has the hair, now it needs your pantyhose.

The Edgewater pet salon is teaming up with thousands of pet groomers, hair salons, and wool and alpaca farmers across America in donating clean hair and animal fur to Matter of Trust, a San Francisco-based environmental organization that is making hair “booms” to help mop up the BP oil spill off the Louisiana Gulf Coast.

Hair booms are nylon stockings stuffed with animal fur, fleece or human hair. The homemade booms which resemble oversized, hairy sausages have proven very effective in absorbing petroleum oil spills in waterways. Volunteers tie the booms together which are covered in plastic mesh before being placed on the water.

Patti Colandrea, co-owner of the Bark Bark Club at 5943 N. Broadway, learned of the Matter of Trust program from a client and has been sending dog hair to the environmental group ever since.

“The animals that are dying and the fishermen who’ve lost their livelihoods are heartbreaking,” Colandrea said. “All of the hair that falls on my floor every week is being sent to Matter of Trust.”

Hair booms: They're not pretty but they do a good job holding back oil spills. (Photo: MatterOfTrust.org)

Hair booms have been used since 1998 to clean up oil spills in the water. Invented by a hair stylist, a single hair boom can absorb up to five gallons of oil.

All of the pet hair clippings collected by the Bark Bark Club is clean because dogs are shampooed before being groomed.  Clean hair is preferred rather than unwashed hair because each strand of hair has scales which better attracts oil molecules that cling to the hair.  

A typical hair boom weighs between five and seven pounds. While industrial booms are used to contain oil in deeper waters, the homemade hair booms are placed on beaches and fragile waterways, minimizing the environmental damage to marine life and coastal shorelines.

Unlike large industrial booms that are made from synthetic materials that must be burned or buried in landfills creating even more pollution, the low-tech, natural booms can be wrung out and re-used up to 100 times.

Colandrea vacuums up enough pet hair at the busy pet salon every day to fill a 20-gallon Shop Vac. The hair and fur is emptied into a plastic garbage bag and boxed at the end of the week to be sent to a Matter of Trust warehouse.

Not only do these dogs look good, they're environmental warriors.

While the environmental group has temporarily stopped signing up new hair donors until it works through the tons of hair that it has already stockpiled, pet groomers and hair salons interested in donating hair are being put on a reserve list until further notice. Matter of Trust is, however, in need of donations of nylon stockings and pantyhose. 

So far, BP has rejected Matter of Trust’s offer of the homemade hair booms to minimize the oil spill’s damage to the Gulf Coast shoreline according to news reports.  The environmental group is making the homemade hair booms available to government and municiple hazardous materials teams working along the Gulf Coast.

Bark Bark Club is asking local residents to drop off their nylon stockings and pantyhose at the salon located at 5943 N. Broadway during business hours from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

“You can feel good about getting your dog groomed here because you’re helping the environment,” Colandrea said.

See how hair booms work (Video: MatterOfTrust.org)