Human hair

The new age of trichology

How can we use human hair waste to create new materials and design outputs?

The UK alone ‘creates’ around 6.5 million kilograms of human hair waste annually, which mostly ends up in landfill or slowly decays in the environment. This causes several problems for both the environment and human health, releasing toxic gasses and choking the drainage system. However, human hair has many valuable properties; it has a high tensile strength and is thermally insulating, flexible, oil-absorbent and lightweight.

Studio Sanne Visser explores the pure potential of hair as a raw material, reducing waste, environmental problems and the pressure on other non-renewable materials. The project consists of a range of utilitarian objects and tools that helps to create a system all the way from collection through to the end application.

Text submitted by the maker and edited by the Future Materials Bank. For information about reproducing (a part of) this text, please contact the maker.