Use your hair to help your garden or fight pollution. A Bay Area group shows how

Try answering this off the top of your head: What’s an abundant renewable resource that can spur growth in your garden and clear pollutants from bodies of water?

The answer, according to a Bay Area nonprofit, is hair.

Matter of Trust, an ecologically focused group in San Francisco, has been using hair for more than two decades to clean up oil spills and other pollution from bodies of water. Its latest project is encouraging the growth of vegetation in the Presidio in San Francisco, a national park site.

Matter of Trust is using hair to encourage the growth of vegetation in the Presidio in San Francisco.

(Matter of Trust)

The group got its start after learning about Phil McCrory’s hairy idea in the ’90s.

The inspiration came to McCrory, a hair stylist in Alabama, when he was washing a client’s locks as CNN was showing images of otters covered in crude oil from the Exxon Valdez tanker that slammed into an Alaskan reef in 1989.

McCrory realized that in his hands was a fiber that soaks up oils, according to Lisa Gautier, founder of Matter of Trust. But after the haircut, it would be swept up, trashed and dumped in a landfill.

Gautier and McCrory became partners. He developed a way to turn hair, fur, wool or fleece into mats to absorb petroleum. Later, they discovered that the material could be stuffed into recycled burlap sacks and pantyhose to make booms or mats that would soak up oil.

The idea was put to the test in 2007, when a 926-foot cargo ship, the Cosco Busan, sideswiped a support on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The collision opened a nearly 100-foot-long gash on the side of the ship, causing 58,000 gallons of heavy bunker fuel to leak into the ocean.

Within hours, Gautier said, she and her team coordinated hundreds of volunteers to place hair-infused booms and mats along San Francisco’s beaches.

To try to get rid of the waste the booms and mats collected, the team subjected them to two composting methods: worms and thermophilic fungi, or heat-loving bacteria and fungi that can kill pathogens by generating high temperatures. After about 18 months, the hazardous waste was turned into healthy compost, Gautier said.

The hair mats’ latest job, at the Presidio, will test their fertilizing capabilities.

Hair can be formed into mats that soak up oil or can be used as mulch.

(Matter of Trust)

In a pilot study, the hair mats are being used as a mulch on the patchy park land. The results surprised the Presidio Trust’s associate director, Lew Stringer, SFGate reported.

“The sections we planted using that material as substrate clearly grew more robustly than the control areas,” Stringer said.

Bay Area and Los Angeles residents who compost or want to boost the vegetation on their property can use human or pet hair. It’s lightweight, and you can put it on top of the soil in your flower pots and garden, Gautier said. If the hair is longer than 2 inches, bury it in the soil to avoid entangling birds’ feet, she recommends.

If you want to donate hair to Matter of Trust, sign up on the organization’s website, the Hum Sum. Gautier said the group accepts all human, pet and synthetic hair but asks that the various types be packaged separately.