BRUSSELS — Coiffeurs throughout Belgium are sweeping up and bagging hair clipped from their clients, after which handing it over to an NGO that recycles it to guard the atmosphere.
The Hair Recycle mission feeds locks and tresses right into a machine that turns them into matted squares that can be utilized to soak up oil and different hydrocarbons polluting the atmosphere, or made into bio-composite luggage.
Project co-founder Patrick Janssen, explaining that 1 kilogram of hair can soak up 7-8 liters of oil and hydrocarbons, stated the mats might be positioned in drains to absorb air pollution in water earlier than it reaches a river.
“Our products are all the more ethical as they are manufactured locally … they are not imported from the other side of the planet,” he informed Reuters. “They are made here to deal with local problems.”
The mission stated on its web site that hair has highly effective properties: one strand can help as much as 10 million instances its personal weight, and in addition to absorbing fats and hydrocarbons, it’s water-soluble and extremely elastic as a result of its keratin fibres.
Isabelle Voulkidis, supervisor of the Helyode salon in Brussels, is certainly one of dozens of hairdresser throughout the nation that pay a small price to the mission to gather their hair cuttings.
“What motivates me, personally, is that I find it a shame hair is nowadays just thrown in the bin, when I know that so much could be done with it,” she stated, as she combed and clipped certainly one of her buyer’s hair. — Reuters
