This story is Weekly-World-News-meets-The-Onion weird. Volunteers near San Francisco Bay are using mats of human hair and oyster mushrooms to help clean up the 58,000 gallons of spilled heavy bunker fuel that's washing ashore.
It's true. Check out this article in the San Francisco Chronicle. Turns out the hair mats (which are woven in Georgia from hair from SF salons and normally used to absorb motor oil) do a bang-up job sucking up the oil dumped from a container ship that smacked into the Bay Bridge. They're being provided by Lisa Gautier, who runs a non-profit that apparently deals in hair.
Then the idea is to grow the 'shrooms on the mats, where they absorb the oil in about 12 weeks and the whole thing can be composted. The effort got a break when "national mushroom expert Paul Stamets was in town the weekend after the spill for the Green Festival, heard of Gautier's work and donated $10,000 worth of oyster mushrooms to harvest on the oily hair mats."
The Environmental Protection Agency was feelin' the love as well and decided to support the effort -- which seems to be working -- providing "hair brigade" volunteers four-hour classes to certify them to clean up oil.
Unfortunately they haven't gotten the man (a.k.a. the Coast Guard) on board. From the Chronicle:
Cleaning San Fran oil spill with hair mats and mushrooms
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