A group called Matter of Trust has been collecting hair since 1998. Why? Because human hair is designed to absorb oil (like the oils from your scalp) and oil just so happens to be a fairly big problem these days. The newest oil leak is certainly not a rare occurrence, just the biggest in a long string of oil escaping into the ocean. Our hair, when packed into nylons and placed on the surface of the ocean around an oil spill has the power to absorb oil at a tremendous rate. NPR has done a nice little news story about Matter of Trust and the good work they’ve been doing, and the video below has some amazing imagery and statistics as well…

So, why am I talking about all of this? Beyond the fact that it is amazing that something we throw away daily can help save some of the lives we have put in danger with deep sea drilling and oil leaks from ships and pipes all of these years, Sterling College threw a huge hair-cutting party last week! Joe and I both donated hair…

During…

Before…

After.

Hannah lopped off her pretty braids and trimmed her hair down to an inch. Others completely shaved their heads and some only took a few inches off. Between 54 Sterlingites, Linus and Cody’s dog Willow we managed to donated 8 lbs of hair! I was impressed by how many people decided to join in and how many people volunteered three hours of their time to cut people’s hair.That’s about half of the population at Sterling. One of our faculty even went to a local barbershop and collected their hair too! It felt great to help and even better to have an experience draw so many of us together. Good job Sterling! If you’re interested, hop on over to matteroftrust.org and see what you can do too! Dog, rabbit and other manimal hair can be donated too…