Daily Loaf

We are told that we must recycle. So we put our cans, glass and plastics in our curbside bins. Or we collect our bits and drive them to the nearest recycling station. Maybe we even take old electronics to swap shops to keep the chemicals from leeching into the ground.

But what about the less obvious stuff? What about recycling our own hair?

Think about it. We’re always shedding it, and our heads always (sometimes) replenish it. If it doesn’t get tossed in the waste bin, it gets washed down the shower drain where it creates an icky clog that the eeeevil commercials tell us we need to use chemicals to unclog. So save your hair (and your drain pipes) and try some fun ways to keep using it.

First off, you can recycle significant lengths of your hair by donating to wig-makers. There’s Locks of Love, which makes wigs for underprivileged youths in North America who have lost their hair from medical treatments. (I once had hair down to my waist while in college, and I donated over a foot of hair to this program.) Pantene has a program called Beautiful Lengths, which donates real-hair wigs to cancer victims, and there’s also Wigs for Kids, which gives wigs to children who have lost their hair from health issues or burns. Each program has different length requirements, from 8-12 inches minimum, so read up on what they want, chop that ponytail off, and help someone feel a little better about him or herself.

Turn long-ish clippings into paint brushes. No, really. For brush-building instructions, you can use environmentally friendly glue to adhere the new bristles to the brush handle. Recycling projects like these are great for youths (because they get to be craftsy) and for adults (because what adult doesn’t like to save money?).

If you like to sew, make homemade pincushions with your hair instead of a cotton filling. The natural oils will keep your pins and needles from rusting.

Or, you could keep your hair clippings to utilize outdoors. If you have snails getting into your flower beds, sprinkle some hair clippings around the soil. Snails don’t enjoy prickly things on their underbellies, so they’ll shy away. Toss some hair on your compost pile — apparently hair has way more nitrogen in it than your standard fertilizer. And if you grow roses, the flowers love the keratin that is added to the soil as the hair decomposes.

But what about longer hair? Like, the stuff you shed into a comb or hairbrush or that falls away into the shower drain? There are two nice options to keep your hair from running down the drain. You could buy a hair trap and place it over your drain hole. Or you can do what I do and buy a scalp scrubber on the cheap at your local drugstore. I use a scrubber to comb through my long hair while I’m showering — not only does it help detangle my locks, it also grabs a fair amount of loose hair. Then when I’m done showering, I pick the hairs off of the scrubber.

What you do with the longer hairs is up to you. You could keep them in a little Tupperware or plastic baggy for use until later crafting ideas strike your fancy. You could spread them out along bushes and treelines where you’ve seen birds, and the birds can use the hair to line their nests. You can take a whole bunch of hair, shove it in a nylon stocking, and use it to soak up oil spills in your garage.

Actually, I have to give credit where it’s due when it comes to using hair to clean up oil spills. Phil McCrory, a hair stylist from Alabama, came up with the idea of using hair to absorb spilled oil. During the Exxon Valdez accident in the late 1980s, he was struck by how quickly the otters’ fur had absorbed all the oil. He took this concept and ran with it, going on to develop oil-spill mats made out of human hair through Matter of Trust. Both individuals and businesses can send in hair to be turned into mats. The mats will be used for emergency oil spills and for oiled bird and mammal cages.

And you can even do a lot of these with pet hair. Heck, if you know somebody who loves to still spin yarn from scratch, you could ask if he or she would be willing to spin your little friend’s fur into some soft yarn for knitting or crocheting. It takes a lot of hair to make a significant amount of yarn, but at least this way you’ll be serious when you make that crack about being able to knit a whole new cat from what you just brushed off of Mr. Fluffymuffins.

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