Recycle, Repurpose, Reuse even Hair!!

Hello and welcome to our first blog!

Let's talk about something that is really close to my heart recycling, repurposing and reusing!

I have always had a love for upcycling making drab old pieces of furniture (others junk) into beautiful unique pieces. I've cut legs off display cabinets painting and wallpapering them to make them into works of art. Using old draws to make shelves. Tins into plant pots and candle holders the list is endless of what I have made from old toot. Recently during lockdown 3, we use old pallets to create our unit that sits 6 clients as well as having drawers. Our pallet wall. All the pallets were collected from around Deal and Dover! So thank you to all of those people who had me randomly knock on their door to ask if I could take their pallets that were in their gardens and driveways! The end result is just incredible and I couldn't be happier with it!

After doing this I thought about how else we can do our bit to help the environment. We do paperless transactions sending email and text receipts, confirmation and reminders.  I contacted Biffa and arranged for us to recycle all our foil, colour tubes, paper towels, cardboard and plastics.  Then we found a way of recycling our coffee pods as we have hundreds a week. Now I have found a way to recycle hair!

In our industry alone we create 400,000 pounds of waste every day just going to landfills. That's over 150 million pounds a year! It's crazy and has really made me take stock of what else we can do! Our biggest throwaway item is hair cuttings in our little salon. So after lengthy research to find out if the hair is good for anything else other than landfill I have found so amazing things that hair can be used for and it has really encouraged me to stop putting it in the bin and start offering it to anyone who can make use of it!

So here's what I've found hair in amazing for...

• Because of hair porose nature, it is great for oil spills so any garages out there or let's go big oil companies with huge tankers how better to clean up oil spills than using hair cuttings!
• Eco-friendly fertilizer! Did you know that hair has roughly 16% nitrogen which makes it a really effective fertilizer! Here's a fun fact cattle excrements have 0.2%-0.3% nitrogen!
• Because hair decomposes very slowly in moisture and soil it can take months to degrade supplying your plants or crops with nutrients far longer than shop bought products!
• It's a great deterrent for animals and insects that love to eat and dig up our lovely flowerbeds and allotments!
• In America, they use human hair mats on crop fields saving them $50,000 on pesticides alone.
• Hair can absorb chemicals such as formaldehyde and heavy metals like mercury from the water making it a low-cost way to purify water!
• The strength of human hair can be great to reinforce clay-based construction. All around the world hair is mixed with clay to make plaster for houses as it has the added benefit of thermal insulation!
• Because of hairs elasticity and thermal insulation properties hair has been known to be used to stuff mattresses, toys and other household items like draft excludes!

So for all, you craft lovers, garden lovers, allotments lovers, eco-friendly lovers come grab your free hair we have masses of it!