Green Wave Environmental Care Project 2019

Cleaner Way to Clean Oil Spills

Architecture student Raynard Jun Kiat and Industrial Design student Lim Jing Jie won the Green Wave Environmental Care Project 2019 for Tertiary School Category.

Designed to take advantage of the absorptive nature of hair, this project explored the possibility to replace ineffective measures that are currently on the market with a more renewable strategy which would take advantage of a natural waste product: human hair.

Looking for a feasible alternative to a sorbent boom, research was found that experimented with human hair as a replacement. Hair was deemed as suitable alternative because of the adsorbent properties of hair. The methodology that was employed here was rather simple. Hair was stuffed into a stocking and thereafter simply placed into an affected area to soak up the affected area.

This soaked product was then re-processed into a less harmful compost which could be discarded safely. As the process of making this sorbent boom was easy to replicate, it is thus the purpose of this report to prove that hair is capable of absorbing oil as research. This home-made sorbent boom could easily be made with household items, which are easily available.

However, this is not the final solution and this project serves to prove that the home-made sorbent boom can be further improved, utilizing a 3D-printed capsule that will be elaborated on further in this report. This is to ensure that the proposed solution is as renewable as possible in the hopes that it does not cause unintended harm to the environment. Combining the hair and the buoy together will produce the product of this project: ‘Hairy Buoys’.