In article ,
says...

Janet wrote in
:

In article , says...

Question: Is it ok to add hair to a compost pile?

I'm talking about dog hair, cat hair, and human hair.
Has anyone done it?

Yes, I always put pet hair in the bin I used to collect sacks of
human
whenever I went to the hairdresser (I've given that up now that the
chemical and dye content is so high).
I still do collect sacks of sheep wool waste from the shearing shed
floor, makes great compost.

Composting wool was an old North-country gardeners practice when
gardeners used to collect shoddy from the woollen mills.

Janet



Janet,
As far as I know shoddy is recycled wool.
How can that be because in the mills it was freshly woven so not recycled.
Can you help me with this strange request?

Not all the mills were weaving; some were spinning, and not all the
spinning mills used new wool. They also recycled old wool garments and
spun the fibre into shoddy, a cheaper yarn. Which is why the word shoddy
now means lower quality.

IIRC the Yorshire rhubarb industry used lots of shoddy.

Janet.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossar..._manufacturing

Shoddy
Recycled or remanufactured wool. Historically generated from loosely
woven materials. Benjamin Law invented shoddy and mungo, as such, in
England in 1813. He was the first to organise, on a larger scale, the
activity of taking old clothes and grinding them down into a fibrous state
that could be re-spun into yarn. The shoddy industry was centred on the
towns of Batley, Morley, Dewsbury and Ossett in West Yorkshire, and
concentrated on the recovery of wool from rags. The importance of the
industry can be gauged by the fact that even in 1860 the town of Batley
was producing over 7000 tonnes of shoddy. At the time there were 80 firms
employing a total of 550 people sorting the rags. These were then sold to
shoddy manufacturers of which there were about 130 in the West Riding.