Composting oil spill with mushrooms and hair

There has been a lot written in the last few weeks about cleaning up the oil spill in San Francisco using human hair mats and oyster mushrooms. Many have poked fun at it or tried to make it in a big political statement.

As a vegetable gardener and avid composter, I see things through biodegrading glasses.

To keep perspective, this was only allowed as an experiment and may not even work on a large scale. It took a $10,000 donation in mushrooms and the hairmats came from a single small supplier. It also requires a lot of space to carry this out. So to do this on a large scale would require a huge commitment and have to be planned and staged ahead of time.

But it is from experiments like this that allow use to change. Talking about new creative ideas to handle oil spills and to deal with waste is all fine, but actually testing and deploying the ideas takes courage and it is from actions that we can learn.

The end result of this isn't going to be anything that I can put in my vegetable garden. Paul Stamets was quoted to say the soil created was only good for landscaping, so there must still be some toxic residual waste when done. I wonder what would happen if it was vermicomposted afterwards.

So keep experiments like this in perspective, learn from it, and be happy that we are always looking for new and better ways to clean up our planet and know efforts like this are looking for new solutions to old problems. Right now we have a lot of old problems that need new and better solutions.