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Brilliant is offering all SciShow viewers a 30 day free trial and 20% off an annual premium subscription for the first 200 people who sign up at Brilliant.org/SciShow. If you ever witnessed an oil spill unfolding right in front of you, your first instinct probably wouldn’t be to dunk your head in it.

But that might be exactly what we need from our most dedicated environmentalists. Well, not literally. Don’t actually do that.

But if you were to chop off some of your hair and weave it into a mat, you might have actually made something that could help the situation. Human hair is among a few of the more… shall we say peculiar methods researchers have proposed for cleaning up oil spills. And aactually, not even proposed.

Hair and some of these other bizarre methods have already seen use in the real world. Here’s how they work… and why we need to turn to such unusual options. [intro] When an oil spill happens, there are a few main ways we clean them up. One method is called a boom, which is a floating barrier made of stuff like metal or plastic that can physically contain the oil.

Some other key ones are using dispersal agents, setting the oil on fire, or sending skimmers, boats that remove oil from the water’s surface by skimming oil off the top. Another is using synthetic materials to soak up the oil. Unfortunately, these can be a source of pollution themselves and further damage an already stressed out ecosystem.

On top of the pollution from dispersants and other synthetic materials, these materials are generally super expensive, and they take a lot of time and resources to pull off. So, researchers have been looking for more sustainable approaches, and they’ve been looking in some pretty bizarre places… like on your head. Hair is a natural sorbent, which is basically just something that can soak up something else, by either adsorption or absorption.

Absorption is when the sorbent soaks up the other substance in its pores or between its molecules. Which is why we use the word for, like, kitchen sponges. Adsorption is a different story.

Adsorption is when the sorbent soaks up material by holding the other substance as a film on its outside surface. And It’s times like these when I question why we let scientists name things. But yes, the difference matters.

Human hair adsorbs oil because the outermost layer of the hair, the cuticle, is made up of hydrophobic dead cells. Hydrophobic materials repel water, so they clump together when they’re in water to try to touch the least amount of water possible. So, when hair is immersed in oil after an oil spill, the hydrophobic oil will cling to the hydrophobic surface of the hair.

And when you remove the hair, the oil goes with it. And this idea is not just theoretical. It’s been demonstrated in studies, and has even helped clean up some real-world oil spills.

When the Philippines experienced oil spills 2006 and 2023, they held nationwide drives for hair collection and made the hair into booms and mats that helped soak up the oil. If others follow their lead, it might be possible to plan ahead for the next big oil spill disaster, which unfortunately is gonna come at some point. For example, a volunteer organization called “Matter of Trust” collects public donations from barber shops, salons, and pet groomers all over the US to make hair mats proactively.

One downside to these mats is that the more widely used synthetic booms have more consistent results than the hair equivalents. Human hair is super variable in type and texture, which means the outcomes are also variable. Also, at least one study showed that hair is much less buoyant than booms made from synthetic materials, which are engineered specifically to clean up oil spills.

This means that the hair booms may have a higher chance of sinking in the water and becoming unrecoverable, with oil and all. Overall though, this research is low cost, effective, and environmentally friendly, and it might be able to help us out of some ”hairy” oil spill situations. I don’t blame you if you’re a little weirded out thinking about your hair floating around in the ocean soaking up oil.

So that’s not your speed, maybe you’ll be more into peat moss. Peat moss isn’t just good for gardening. It’s another cheap, biodegradable, and effective sorbent that can clean up oil spills.

Peat moss can hold a lot of oil because it’s super porous, which gives it a large surface area for oil particles to adsorb to. It also has a bunch of small, tube-like spaces that can absorb and retain hydrocarbons, which is the main chemical component of crude oil. I Told you we needed both words.

Peat moss is also super buoyant, floats well on the water’s surface, and we can recover it and its absorbed oil easily. And like hair mats, this idea has been put to the test in the real world, only on the shore this time. One company in Norway developed a peat moss product that, when mixed with gravel and stone, helped clean up a geological conservation area affected by an oil spill off the Norwegian coast in 2009.

And while it definitely can com”peat” with hair for the title of “best new method,” peat moss isn’t the perfect solution to all of our oil spill woes. Peat moss isn’t super hydrophobic, so one worry is that the porosity of the moss might cause it to absorb more water than oil, when the point is for the water to stay where it is. Also, peat moss has limited availability.

It is commercially available, but it originally comes from wetlands, and harvesting the moss is not great for those ecosystems. Whereas your hair gets swept up and tossed every time you go to the barber. So hair and peat moss both have potential for the water, and moss has also been used successfully to clean up spilled oil that washed ashore.

But what happens when oil spills on land and soaks right into the thirsty ground? Well, Two words: Chicken. Poop.

When oil spills happen on land, they usually contaminate soil, so wherever possible, cleanup efforts tend to focus on relatively natural methods to avoid making the problem worse. And It turns out that chicken manure may be a sustainable and environmentally friendly option. It can be used for cleanup of the oily soil because its microorganisms can detoxify and process the components of the oil.

One study found that chicken poop likely has the right chemical and microbial characteristics to effectively trigger the break down oil in contaminated soil. Microorganisms in poultry dung use hydrocarbons as a source of energy, so when they’re in crude oil, they basically just eat it right up. And Chicken poop also raises soil pH, making it a better environment for the bacteria eating the crude oil.

This has a lot of potential as an oil spill cleanup method that has no substantial impact on the soil and no toxic byproducts. But, the poop does require specific environmental conditions to work properly. Factors like temperature, oxygen levels, and others all affect the process of degrading the oil.

It’s also not the fastest cleanup technique, so it is better for long-term operations, and not in an emergency situation. And more research needs to be done on the poop of other animals, so if you really like working with animal poop, now is your time to shine! These methods may not be perfect, but they are definitely a step in the right direction for improving our oil spill cleanup techniques, without harming the environment in the process.

And it doesn’t hurt that they’re… kinda wacky, too. Now, sometimes big problems like cleaning the ocean require creative approaches. And to flex your creative problem solving skills, you can take Brilliant courses like Creative Coding.

Brilliant is an interactive online learning platform with thousands of lessons in science, computer science, and math. They offer case studies, puzzles, and tons of unique ways to help you engage with each topic. After taking their Creative Coding course, you’ll be able to, as they say, “harness the power of the for loop.” And much of the creative power to coding comes from randomness.

So in this course you’ll become practiced in randomness as well. I don’t know about you, but these course descriptions have really got my brain tingling. So if we’re riding the same brain wave, your next move will be to go to Brilliant.org/SciShow or the link in the description down below.

That link also gives the first 200 people who sign up 20% off an annual premium Brilliant subscription. And you’ll get your first 30 days for free! And thanks to Brilliant for supporting this SciShow video! [ OUTRO ]