Hair Mat and Mushroom Remediation- Image: Matter of TrustWhile news has slowed about the November oil spill of 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel from the Cosco Busan into the San Francisco Bay, Lisa Gautier, head of a San Francisco non-profit called Matter of Trust, and a team in the Presidio are busy working to change the way we clean up oil spills in the future. They are doing this by making a lasagna of sorts.

While it’s definitely not any lasagna you would want to eat-- made of oil soaked hair mats and straw-- oyster mushrooms love it and turn the toxic sludge into rich compost. As the mushrooms feast, spread, and grow large, they bear no traces of the original dangerous substance, toxic bunker oil, because they are capable of breaking the hydrocarbon bonds into sugars, rendering the oil inert.

Lisa’s organization collects hair from salons and individuals to make mats, because hair is something we already have available (that we would normally throw into a landfill), that has a good natural capacity to soak up oil—just think about what your head looks like if you haven’t showered in a while! Made into mats it is used like a sponge to soak up oil, and then the mushrooms devour it all, hair and oil!

The oyster mushroom technology is being tested for its effectiveness in reducing the mess and toxicity of oil in San Francisco Presidio. Until the beginning of January, they were using used motor oil for their research. But in mid January were given 20 gallons of used bunker fuel, and Lisa described it to me on the phone as “greasy nutella”- much heavier and gunkier than the motor oil.

It sank straight to the bottom when they put some in water, which leaves you with a good picture of what the bottom of the bay might look like these days, and makes one consider the late Herring and Crab blooms this year.

Research is being conducted on a variety of substances to layer with the hair mats and mushrooms in an effort to find the cheapest most effective solution that can be shared worldwide for remediating toxic spills. Straw, grain, woodchips and organic fertilizer are among some of the tested materials being layered among the hair mats and mushrooms to create an ideal environment for the mushrooms to grow.

Matter of Trust is saving up donated funds to buy their own needle puncher—the machine used to make hair mats-- so perhaps they can team up with other organizations in the bay and create green jobs for at-risk youth. The goal is to create a system for collecting hair and making mats that would generate enough of the mats to donate them to other places in the world and get the word out about this innovative, cheap solution that uses our scraps, and the ingenuity of nature to protect us from the toxic messes we make.

“Imagine if it were a fire-drill like response,” Lisa tells me. “Imagine if the hair mats were stockpiled, the community was aware of what to do with them, and in the hours after an oil spill they were rushed to the scene of the accident so the oil could be absorbed right away, before it sank to the bottom of the bay, or drifted to the beaches, or got stuck onto birds and other creatures and washed up on the sand.”

Currently about 706 million gallons of oil end up in the oceans each year, and about half of that is from used motor oil that is improperly disposed of. Oil that is "cleaned up" from the ocean is generally dealt with by being incinerated, or basically, being burned to create more pollution, in the atmosphere instead of the oceans.

It is an encouraging thought that a viable way exists to clean up the huge messes we make, and the by-product is compost and mushrooms that are benign enough to be sautéed in butter and garlic and eaten for dinner. Find out more, see pictures and updates, and make donations at www.matteroftrust.org