2021 Edition

In Europe, 72 million kg of human hair waste is generated. Waste hair ends up in landfills, causing the expulsion of toxic gases into the environment. Waste hair accumulates in large amounts in the solid waste streams, choking the drainage systems. It takes several years for human hair before decomposing. While we think of human hair only existing on top of our heads, beauty salons generate huge amounts of waste, where waste management of cities only focuses on collecting the waste. What can we do with the amount of hair waste cities generate every day? Human Material Loops creates a closed-loop recycling system for waste human hair and spins the waste fiber into applicable textile pieces. EU is the largest importer of textile products with an import value of 77 billion USD. In the EU 16 million tons of textile municipal solid waste was generated in 2015. The amount of textile waste has doubled over the last 20 years. Synthetic fibers are non-biodegradable and can take up to 200 years to decompose. Synthetic fibers are used in 72% of our clothing. The Textile Industry is the second largest polluter in the world just after the oil industry.The demand for currently used materials would reduce due to integration of human hair textiles. Processing human hair which today is discarded as waste would introduce a raw material to the textile industry, skipping stages of raw material production: growing,cultivating- human hair until it’s cut is taken care of by individuals; harvest and cleaning process-human hair collection doesn’t require large scale harvest and the cleaning process is almost zero. 2,6% of the global freshwater is used to produce cotton today. Human hair doesn’t require any water for processing. Human hair doesn’t require retting as other plant-based fibers and collected waste hair is already in a later stage compared to other fibers in the refining process.Coloring human hair textiles can be taken from the beauty industry without chemical ingredients. The impact of integrating human hair textiles would not only have huge environmental effects but also the value of our waste would gain new perspectives.