In order the save the planet, leftist alarmists have demanded humans do many outlandish things. From only consuming lab-grown meat to stop cow farts to ending fossil fuels entirely, the left has insisted that humans — and in the U.S., Americans — must fundamentally alter their lives to make what their own experts admit would be a negligible difference in the global climate. Now, there's a growing push for human biomaterial to be used, rather than discarded, to make common goods.
According to the Washington Post, there's another new ploy to make American consumers' purchases more sustainable: products and clothes made from human hair. Apparently, the 32 tons of hair thrown out each day in the U.S. and Canada is a problem, and the salon floor refuse should not be thrown away, but weaved into "fabric for clothes, curtains, carpets and furniture." Yes, really.
"We are moving into a world where sustainability is becoming an important concern,” UC-San Diego material scientist Marc André Meyers told WaPo. "So we try to use materials from nature … and there’s a big push for natural fibers." Wool, cotton, or silk is apparently no longer "green" enough for these people.
According to Amsterdam-based "material designer" Zsofia Kollar, here's how she turns old hair into "sustainable" products, via the Post:
Kollar says she’s cracked the problem of turning locks of hair from the floors of salons into a fabric that looks and feels a lot like wool. “The length and color don’t matter,” she said. “We can use everything.”
The process involves treating the hair with chemicals, which clean it and change its color and texture so that it can be spun into yarn. Kollar says the chemicals are environmentally friendly and don’t pose a health hazard for humans or fish. The yarn can be dyed — any color but white, Kollar said — and woven into fabric like any other thread.
[...]
“Many times if people hear a fabric is made out of human hair, they’re like, ‘Eww!’” she said. “But if I just show them a sample and say, ‘What do you think of this?’ they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s cool.’ And then when I tell them afterward it’s made of hair, it’s a very different reaction.”
Kollar told WaPo her process is sustainable and has "two environmental advantages...[f]irst, it keeps hair out of landfills and incinerators, where it would release greenhouse gases while rotting or burning" and "[s]econd, it avoid the consequences of clearing land to grow cotton, drilling oil to make synthetic fibers or shearing wool from sheep, which belch tons of planet-warming methane."
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Or, and hear me out, we leave our discarded hair where it belongs: in the trash. Also, leave the sheep and their farts alone. These alarmists, like their looney proposals before, seem to be trying to make their side look even crazier than it already appears. Telling people to wear strangers' hair and furnish their homes with it because sheep fart and they hate oil is simply insane.
The human hair-as-fabric idea, like all the other alarmist proposals, would also cripple innovation, development, and industry in poorer nations, and it's worth assuming that the leftists and Democrats demanding such changes won't practice what they preach here either — just as they continue to travel the world on carbon-spewing private jets because they're somehow not the problem.
The benefit of Americans wearing their sheared locks to work and reclining for quiet evenings on their human hair sofa to limit sheep emissions is not going to change the global climate. It's only going to make us seem like freaks decked out in the hair of random strangers.
