Cleaning up oil spills with hair

Did you know big mats of hair can be used for oil spill clean ups? That can both be things like crude petroleum, or oil-based pollutants. Here’s a video with the proof of concept. There are groups and even now a couple of non-profits, that will collect hair donations from barbershops, compress the hair into booms, and send them to spill relief efforts. There are also some native wetland plants like Cattails that can absorb thousands of times their own mass in heavy metals in the surrounding area. They are generally edible, but if they were eaten from somewhere polluted be eating all those concentrated metals.