Out of the Box Ways to Help the Oil Spill
We all feel for the horrible natural disaster continuing to unfold in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s hard to remain positive when so much damage is being done. A sense of powerlessness can take over. But for some, innovative solutions to difficult problems are what they do best.
Take this next story:
By Katherine Gustafson for Tonic.com
As our newest oil spill seeps toward the Louisiana coast, it’s natural to wonder whether there are any out-of-the-box ways to clean up the mess. Is rubbing animals with dish detergent the best we can do?
Looking to the Philippines, we found our answer: human hair. In 2006, the country’s worst-ever oil spill prompted an unusual program in the country’s prisons. Thousands of Philippine inmates had their heads and chests harvested for hair to be used in the clean-up effort. The hair was combined with feathers to create a spongy material that would soak up the more than 50,000 gallons of industrial fuel that had leaked from a sunken tanker off the central island of Guimaras.
The method was also used in San Francisco, when hair mats were employed to clean up the Cosco Busan spill of 2007, which resulted when a cargo ship hit the base of the Bay Bridge and let loose some 58,000 gallons of oil. Lisa Gautier, director of a nonprofit called Matter of Trust, donated 1,000 “oil spill hair mats” she had made for the San Francisco Department of the Environment to absorb motor oil spills.
Once the hair mats, which are size of doormats and feel like Brillo pads, had absorbed all the oil they could, oyster mushrooms were cultivated on the mats to absorb the oil and turn the oily hair into nontoxic compost within 12 weeks, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Mycologist and author Paul Stamets donated $10,000 worth of oyster mushrooms to the cause.
So could hair and mushrooms work in the gulf? Yes, indeed. Lisa Gautier is at it again and wants your hair to the help with the clean-up effort. Find out how to donate your excess locks here.
Source: Gimundo
Could you post this story to your blog. I have to post a news story to a blog site for a journalism course. Thank you. Here it is.
A couple of weekends ago a group of students got together to learn about major environmental issues affecting our world. The conference was called Environmental Youth Leadership Conference and was hosted in Jasper Alberta. Some of the issues they talked about included water shortage in our world and the tar sands in Alberta. I was lucky enough to be able to attend and I learned a lot. We are literally destroying the earth we live on. From the pesticides farmers use to the linkage of millions of chemicals from tailings pond, we are killing our earth. I learned that we have to start taking a stand against these issues if we want our world around in 100 years. We can not just stand around thinking someone else will stop climate change, we have to take a stand and do something.
One First Nations speaker, who spoke to us, told us how much water is used to create every day supplies. For one pound of beef it takes 1799 gallons of water and for 500 sheets of paper, which we use almost every single day, it takes 1321 gallons of water. When we have such a shortage of water why are we wasting so much water on material things? Through this conference we learned the huge impact we have on the environment and what we can do about it.
Getting together with these youths helped me to understand that someone like me can make a difference in the carbon footprint we leave in this world. We do not have to use so much when other third world countries have so little. Even if we start with the small things like taking shorter showers or not keeping the tap water running when you are brushing your teeth, every little bit helps. Hopefully the other students as well as myself who attended this conference will share with their communities the great impact we leave on this world and fight to change the way we destroy our earth. My mom told me a great line the other day, “God won’t have to destroy this earth because we are doing an even better job of it ourselves.”