The Japanese branch of a US environmental organization has launched a pilot project to recycle hair discarded by salons into soil covers for sustainable farming.
Matter of Trust Japan, the Tokyo office of the San Francisco-based organization, began a five-month trial in July, making 30 mats out of human hair for a soybean field with an area of 20 square metres in Yamanashi Prefecture, west of Tokyo.
Hair mats help to retain soil moisture and reduce evaporation, while providing nutrients such as nitrogen and keratin, it says.
“I knew about hair mats for cleaning up an oil spill along the coastline of Mauritius in 2021 and thought of adapting this technique to Japan,” said Nanako Hama, 45, the founder of the Japanese branch.
Such mats have been used in a similar project in Chile since 2021, helping to increase harvests by 30 per cent, according to Matter of Trust Japan. The mats, made of hairs 10 centimetres or longer on the exterior and packed with shorter ones inside, require about 600 to 700 grammes of hair and take 30 to 40 minutes to make.
Kyodo
#GlobalNewLightOfMyanmar