When Life Gives You an Oil Spill, Make ... Mushrooms?

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger calls a state of emergency, San Francisco Bay residents don’t just cooperate, they get creative — extremely creative. Appropriating kitchen utensils, litter-box scoopers, and hair mats — yes, pads of tangled hair — hundreds of Bay-area residents collected a portion of the 58,000 gallons of toxic bunker oil from the recent and devastating Cosco Busan spill. In a true demonstration of "waste-not, want-not," the guerilla cleanup crew will now use the oil-soaked hair mats to grow mushrooms! Ewwwww! But very cool ...

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, hair is the most efficient and abundant material for collecting and containing oil — that’s why we have to wash our own so often. Matter of Trust, a nonprofit that routes donated business castoffs to needy causes, collected hair clippings from thousands of salons and doggie groomers across the country. The clippings were then tangled into mats — think Brillo Pad toupee — and used to soak up the oil. In a process called bioremediation, mushrooms eat the oily mats, detoxify them and turn into compost.

California’s Presidio National Park plans to harvest the hair mats into oyster mushrooms. Mmmmmmm, sounds delicious!

COMMENTS ()