Reuse of human hair waste in the manufacture of composites and assessment of composition effects on mechanical properties

Abstract

Human hair is a common waste material that is found in most parts of the world. Especially, the large amount of human hair accumulation in the waste stream clogs drainage systems causing many environmental problems such as attracting molds and pests, releasing unpleasant odors, slowing drainages, and so on. For waste disposal, human hair can be burned, however, the burning process produces lots of hair dust, foul odors, and toxic gases into the environment affecting human health and life. As one of the solutions to the circular economy, human hair waste has been collected and reused in many fields such as fiber-reinforcing parts in composite materials, adsorbent materials for oil spill cleanup, organic fertilizers for plants, and so on. With focus on producing an efficiency method that offers significant benefits of reusing of waste, the human hair/epoxy composite was fabricated using the hot press technique in this research. Due to the support of the pressing process, the reused human hair waste composition in the composite material was increased compared with the common methods such as hand lay-up and casting techniques. Besides that, the impacts of human hair waste and CaCO3 filler loading on the mechanical properties like tensile strength and flexural strength of the human hair/epoxy composite material were also analyzed for application purposes. As a result, the fabricated composite panel with the ratio of human hair/epoxy at 50/50 added 100 phr of CaCO3 filler introduced the optimal tensile strength, tensile modulus, flexural strength, and flexural modulus at 15.8 MPa, 2.1 GPa, 52.7 MPa, and 7.5 GPa, respectively. The obtained results show the compatibility of the fabricated human hair/epoxy samples compared with the other research which satisfied the requirements for composite applications.