Two Colorado students figured out how to clean an oil spill using human (their own) hair

Colorado students MacGyver their way to oil spill cleanup and a national prize.

"...It’s a drone for oil spills. It sits at the edge of a plastic boom that surrounds and slowly reels in a floating spill, and soaks up the petroleum through a hair filter.

Orca works like the baleen bristles inside a whale’s mouth. (Don’t “actually” the young engineers about orcas being faux whales, because they’ve heard it. They stick to the Wiki explanation of an orca as “a toothed whale belonging to the oceanic dolphin family,” and they know their marketing, as we are about to find out.)



Orca won the Front Range Community College local engineering challenge, and their enthusiastic teachers urged them on to national competitions. So they went. And in June, Cotton and Madrazo won second prize — with a cash chaser — at the National Science Foundation’s annual Community College Innovation Challenge. The judges, who first grilled all the teams in a “Shark Tank”-style atmosphere, called Orca “a new method of cleaning oil spills that is both inexpensive and quick.”

Not to mention, Cotton said, “the current solutions are just terrible. The main solutions are like burning, which releases fumes into the environment, and these chemical disbursers that stay in the ocean releasing toxins. There’s petroleum based sponges, which kind of suck up oil, and then the sponges just fall to the floor, and it’s just littering the oceans for different creatures and critters to eat. We had to make this.”

https://coloradosun.com/2022/07/07/students-innovation-colorado-oil-spill-cleanup-drone-orca/