BellaOnline Forums Beauty and Self Hair Compost your hair

If you work at a salon or dog grooming place, you encounter a lot of hair. The greenest thing you can do with all that is to compost it. It readily will degrade into soil you can use in your houseplants or gardens.

Even just a person at home can compost their hair. If you clean out your brush, or pull a wad of hair from your shower drain, or trim your own ends, you can certainly plunk the hair into your compost bin.

If you don't have a bin, you can actually just let the hair out into the wind near your home, or place the hair into the crotch of a tree for the birds to find and make into their nests.

I still compost all my hair and my cat hairs. But i have heard that if you have long strands and let the birds use it for nests, it can strangle baby birds. Any one else hear that?

You know we compost our pets fur but for some reason I just never thought of composting my husband's (he cuts at home). Thanks for the idea.

Sure! He can also empty his beard shavings into your kitchen pail if he uses an electric shaver.

I guess for long hair strands they can easily be cut to short strands. I think that is best for composting anyway.

This is a good idea.
For some reason I thought that hair would take a long time to break down into compost.

Nah, it composts very quickly, quicker than paper. it's just strands of dead protein, correct?

When I lived in Oregon I used to put hair clippings sparkled around my garden to get rid of snails. They are horrible pests there! They will eat your plants to the nub quickly. Little hair clippings get caught in between their body and shells, and then snail will slime itself to death. A lovely organic way to use hair clippings.

Another way people with thick, course hair can use their hair clippings is to stuff the clippings into homemade pincushions. I have a great aunt who id from Okinawa who did this with her hair, and coarse hair kept the pins and needles very sharp.

It is nice to know that hair composts quickly - my hair is fine and there are no snails where I live now!

If i had a pet groomers or beauty shop, I would compost the lot of it at the end of each day. No reason to lose much needed soil nutrients to the mummification projects that are our sanitary landfills.

Great idea, but I will admit myfirst reaction was to laugh. Never though about recycling hair. I love composting and now I will include all the household hair. We have dogs so it is a lot.

Kay, i know; it sounds funny. Having big or furry dogs, it all adds up. I pull my hairbrush hair and stick it in my kitchen compost bucket too. That's great you'll be composting your doggy hair!

I can't even imagine how much hair a grooming shop goes through. Seems like a waste. I know some places would spin dog hair into wool if they could.