Local alpaca farms donating fleece for oil spill

The shearing didn’t hurt, but Jarugua was not happy. He let everyone know it with an ear-piercing, high-pitched squeal. Ice, on the other hand, was cool during the whole matter, never making a peep.

The alpacas from Oak-Leigh Peacocks and Alpacas are sheared once a year, their fleece sent off to a mill and processed into a soft yarn. But this time, the owners plan to donate fleece to create “hair” booms designed to soak up oil along the Gulf Coast.

“It helps the environment,” said Patti Spruell, who owns Oak-Leigh with husband Kenneth. “Alpacas are environmentally-friendly animals. They’re green. It’s just the thing to do this year.”

Within a couple of weeks of the Deep Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, news reports surfaced of animal fur and human hair being used to make hair booms. It wasn’t long before alpaca farmers, pet groomers and hair salons around the country began donating fur, fleece and hair to be stuffed into pantyhose. Restaurant owners along the Gulf Coast hosted “boom-b-ques” for volunteers to make the sausage-like booms. The donations have been funneled through nonprofits like the San Francisco-based Matter of Trust and the Sunshine and Shores Foundation in Destin, Fla.

At least three or four alpaca farms in the Wiregrass plan to donate what they call “seconds” — the sheared fleece from an alpaca’s legs and belly. That fleece is coarser and typically used to make socks or hats.

But whether the donated hair booms will be used is unclear. On May 10, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a fact sheet on using booms in oil spills and stated that response professionals prefer to use commercial sorbent booms to collect oil.

“Commercially available sorbent booms are a stark contrast to the recent reports of a need for human/pet hair and nylon stockings,” the fact sheet stated. “ ... Recent reports of a need for hair are exaggerated and not helpful to the response effort.”

Still, donations continue and volunteers keep working.

Using hair and fur to absorb oil is not a new concept. Private companies make oil-absorbing mats from ground corncob and other materials. OttiMat, founded 12 years ago, holds a patent on a mat made with human hair.

Billie Golden, who founded the Sunshine and Shores Foundation with her husband, Jeff, said a semi-truck packed with 10,000 pounds of alpaca fiber donated by an Ohio farm arrived Saturday morning. Hanes has donated up to 30 cases of pantyhose for the effort, and a building has been donated for storage.

The Goldens own a pet salon in Destin and started working with Matter of Trust after the oil spill. But as donations came in, the couple set up their own nonprofit. The message they’ve gotten from BP is that the oil company is not ruling any solutions out yet, but their current focus is on stopping the oil from gushing into the Gulf, Billie Golden said.

“Needless to say, we have just been overwhelmed with everybody’s generosity,” she said.