From mops to sops for Gulf oil mess

PROSSER, Wash. -- Jennifer Ely runs her fingers through Carerra's white hair, spread across a chicken wire table.

She pulls, pokes and twists it, discarding dirt, sticks and low-quality clumps to the cement floor of her barn.

"I'll either throw that away or send it to the Gulf," Ely said.

Carerra, a white huacaya alpaca, chomps grass outside in the sun, blissfully unaware of the scrutiny and uncertain destiny of his fleece, which may or may not help clean up the worst oil spill in the nation's history.

Ely is among the dozens of alpaca farmers across the country, as well as thousands of dog groomers and hair stylists, at least considering shipping discarded hair, wool or fur to volunteers using it to soak up oil that has been gushing into the Gulf of Mexico since BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig burned and sank in April. Federal authorities have estimated the ruptured pipe is leaking between 500,000 gallons and about 1 million gallons a day, according to the Associated Press.

Hundreds of volunteers along the coast's beaches, which crude is starting to spoil, are stuffing donated hair cuttings into nylon stockings to create rudimentary oil booms. Hanes recently donated 50,000 nylons to the cause.

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The idea is built on the premise that hair naturally soaks up oil. It's why we need shampoo.

However, there's some confusion over how much the hair will be used. Experts trying to clean up the spill prefer their synthetic booms over the hair-filled versions.

"They sink," said Ben Sherman, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a federal agency offering scientific support to BP and the Coast Guard.

"Unfortunately, they don't work," Sherman said. "We appreciate the public's interests and concerns and willingness to help."

Volunteers, however, have been using them anyway, working on their own, according to news reports from National Geographic and the New York Times. Sherman said he knew nothing about that.

Matter of Trust, a San Francisco nonprofit acting as a clearinghouse for the hair and nylons, claims the hair-filled booms are more ecologically sound because they create less toxic byproducts when incinerated or buried in landfills.

They are still stockpiling hair, said Lisa Craig Gautier, president of the organization, though her e-mailed statements are unclear about how and when it will be used.

So far, the organization has 19 warehouses full of fiber, about 20 percent of it is alpaca and llama fur, Gautier said.

A notice on the organization's website -- matteroftrust.org -- asks potential donors to hold onto their collected cuttings and subscribe to e-mail alerts that will send warehouse addresses when space becomes available.

The website said thousands of salons across the country have sent human hair clippings to help deal with spills since the group started in 1998. The hair has been used on smaller spills before the BP disaster.

And any type of hair works, the website said: straight, curly, dyed, permed, even dreadlocks.

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A La Mode Spa and Salon in Yakima is getting involved.

"We're a lot smaller quantities than the alpaca farm," said Bonnie Carter, owner of the salon. The shop has sent about three 4-square-foot boxes to Matter of Trust in the past year.

Studio 16 Hair Design has collected more than 20 pounds of hair, stuffed into black yard leaf bags over the past seven months. They just shipped one bag and have started filling another, said Sara Nagle, a stylist at Studio 16. They also take donated nylons for the effort, Nagle said.

The clients don't seem to mind.

"They're happy, they don't use it anymore," Nagle said.

The hair piles up even faster at some dog groomers.

Lori Tapscott, owner of Golden Clippers of Selah, collected two kitchen garbage bags full of dog hair in one week.

However, she recently threw them away, unsure of how much Matter of Trust still needed it.

"I hate throwing it away because we know the benefits of it," she said.

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Ely and her husband John, a UPS freight pilot, have owned Sage Bluff Alpacas near Prosser for about three years.

They're mostly in it for the breeding, but Ely takes her time sorting through the fleece, shorn in early May, both to learn about the animals' traits and to sell the fleece to mills and manufacturers.

"Ah, this is gorgeous stuff," she said digging her hands into a mounds of hair on the sorting table. "I'm just a fleece junky."

Ely is busy culling the valuable stuff, the first and second cuttings used in sweaters, hats and rugs. Even portions of the least desirable third cuttings, taken from the belly and legs of the animals, she makes into dog beds.

This spring, she figures she cut about 180 pounds of fur from her 30 alpacas; 20 to 30 pounds of it will be unusable and would qualify for oil clean-up duty.

Ely is in no rush to ship it anywhere, to the Gulf or the landfill, and will do some more research before making up her mind.

However, she likes the idea of volunteers using it even if the government won't.

"For small, independent, grass-roots efforts, that's where I think it's working," she said.

* Ross Courtney can be reached at 509-930-8798 or rcourtney@yakimaherald.com.