Making hair booms in Mobile. Photo courtesy of Amanda Bacon Thanks, everyone, who helped with finding out more about those hair booms or mats folks are donating clippings for to help protect the Gulf Coast. BP says its responders aren’t using the hair booms because...

Social gatherings at which volunteers learn how to construct homemade oil-defense booms. Hair and pantyhose are being shipped to the Gulf Coast to help defend the coastline against oil spilling from the Deepwater Horizon rig, Sarah Wheaton reported in The Times: At...

Can human hair and pantyhose save the Gulf? Well, no, it can't. The oil slickspreading from a damaged drilling rig off the coast of Louisiana is already too massive for any quick fix, no matter how well intended. But the environmental calamity has inspired a quirky...

Workers in the Gulf of Mexico are using oil containment booms to sop up oil and protect coastlines from the approaching slick. Commercial booms are usually made of plastic. But an alternative source for the booms is found on the floor of salons across the country. As...

Ah, stuff. We need it, we want it, we love it. Until we hate it, get bored with it, or wear it out (unless you're a hoarder and you just keep everything). Sure, some of it winds up in the green bin or goes to Goodwill. But chances are, you're sending a lot of things...

Lisa Gautier’s environmentalist career didn’t begin with a treetop hunger strike or a bracing voyage on a Greenpeace boat. It began with an old rug. “I bought a new rug and I didn’t know what to do with the old one,” says the 36-year-old San Franciscan. So Gautier...

The deluge of closures and cutbacks at tech startups is creating at least one beneficial side effect. Charity workers who distribute furniture and gadgetry that companies leave behind are finding themselves with plenty of stock. That's how it seems at...