Now they are coming for your — HAIR?! Wash Post touts ‘recycling human hair…into clothes’ as a ‘climate solution’ – ‘Weaving with human hair…keeps hair out of landfills & incinerators, where it would release greenhouse gases’

The United States and Canada throw out 32 tons of hair per day, according to a report from the waste management firm Green Circle Salons. But Kollar says there’s a better use for all those wasted locks: weaving them into clothing. In 2021, she launched a start-up, dubbed the Human Material Loop, to turn hair swept off the floors of salons and barbershops into fabric for clothes, curtains, carpets and furniture.

Kollar is part of a group of entrepreneurs and environmentalists looking for ways to recycle human hair. The wig industry has been putting long strands of cut hair to use for centuries. But more recently, companies and nonprofits have been turning shorter scraps of hair into fertilizer, using it to clean up oil spills or breaking it down into its essential amino acids for use in beauty products.

“We are moving into a world where sustainability is becoming an important concern,” said Marc André Meyers, a material scientist at the University of California at San Diego. “So we try to use materials from nature … and there’s a big push for natural fibers.”

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There are two environmental advantages of weaving with human hair, according to Kollar. First, it keeps hair out of landfills and incinerators, where it would release greenhouse gases while rotting or burning. Second, it avoids the consequences of clearing land to grow cotton, drilling oil to make synthetic fibers or shearing wool from sheep, which belch tons of planet-warming methane.

As an economic bonus, human hair comes free. Unlike sheep, people feed themselves, wash their own hair and pay to be shorn at barbershops and salons. All Kollar has to do is collect it.

But all the processing that comes afterward is expensive, especially because Human Material Loop is a start-up producing fabrics in small batches. Right now, Kollar says, her human hair fabric costs more than wool, cotton or polyester. “But once we reach a full-scale production, we can provide a very competitive price,” she said.