Meet the
Hair Boom.
What if the hair swept from your salon floor could help tackle pollution in our rivers and waterways? That's exactly what we're doing with hair booms.
Discover how they work
Waste hair.
New purpose.
Hair booms are sausage-like tubes packed with waste human hair collected from salons. When they're placed in polluted water, the hair helps attract and hold oils and pollutants.
Instead of treating salon hair as rubbish, we're treating it as a resource. Hair collected through Green Salon Collective can become part of projects that help clean polluted waterways across the UK and Ireland.
The haircut happens in the salon.
The impact can go much further.
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Hair has a pretty useful superpower.
ADSORBHuman hair is naturally good at adsorbing oil and pollutants. That little extra letter matters.
Unlike absorbing, where a substance is taken inside a material, adsorbing means particles cling to its surface.
Pack waste hair together inside a boom and you create a simple tool that can help collect oil, sludge and other pollutants from the surface of water.
How does salon hair end up cleaning waterways?
It starts with something that happens thousands of times every day: a haircut.
You cut it
Hair clippings are collected from salon floors instead of being thrown into general waste.
We collect it
Green Salon Collective members send their waste hair back through our specialist salon recycling system.
We transform it
Hair can be tightly packed into netting to create cylindrical hair booms ready for use.
It gets to work
The finished booms can be deployed in waterways where the hair helps adsorb oil and pollutants.
An oil spill in Northern Ireland.
In 2021, red diesel from farmland was leaking into the sea in Northern Ireland.
Waste hair collected through Green Salon Collective was put to work as part of the clean-up.
30–45kg of waste hair was used over the weekend as part of the clean-up.Taking salon hair back to the water.
In May 2026, the Green Salon Collective team joined the Surfers Against Sewage Paddle Out Protest in Windsor, alongside around 100 people calling for cleaner rivers and waterways.
We brought around 20 hair booms with us. The team took to the water towing several of them behind their paddleboards, where they collected sludge, oil and pollutants.
Once used, the booms can be wrung out, dried in the sun and reused again.
haircuts worth of waste hair, put back to work.
The hair booms used at the Windsor Paddle Out were estimated to contain hair from around 3,000 to 4,000 haircuts, collected from salons recycling with Green Salon Collective across the UK and Ireland.
The hair swept from your salon floor doesn't have to be rubbish. It can become part of the solution.
Recycle your salon hair.
Hair booms are just one of 15+ ways we're finding new uses for salon hair. Join Green Salon Collective and help turn the hair leaving your salon floor into something useful.