Hairdresser to hair-composter

IT appears Jackie Yong was always destined for a career working with people’s hair, it just may not be the kind she might have imagined when she opened her first business.

It was while working at her successful salon in Melbourne that an idea was born.

“I used to be a hairdresser back in the day and I owned a salon in St Kilda,” she said.

“It was during a drought when I was cleaning the salon floor and I thought, ‘look at all this hair, I wonder if this could help hold moisture’.”

Ms Yong said it made her think, so much so she went home and did a little digging online, and in the garden.

“I did a little research and I went headfirst down this rabbit hole and found out that hair is good for composting,” she said. “It has all these good nutrients and does amazing stuff for the soil.

“One day as I was doing some trials and could see where I was mixing chopped hair with potting mix that the grass was growing faster.

“I thought ‘ok, I am on to something here’.”

It wasn’t a straightforward journey for Ms Yong from there, but now she is the owner-operator of Soilz Alive a successful composting business in Bendigo and it’s thanks to hair.

“I believe that hair really is a remarkable product,” she said. “It essentially has the highest nitrogen level of any composting material. It has 27 trace elements, and it has amino acids.

“Hair is actually a protein, it’s keratin. We eat proteins to make us big and strong. Soils need it as well. When people use blood and bone, for example, that’s a concentration with protein in it.

“When you look at hair it’s quite deceiving, it doesn’t really do much and it certainly doesn’t look like much, but it is just this big bunch of goodness.”

You will find Ms Yong and Soilz Alive at the Bendigo Sustainability Festival, at Garden for the Future on Sunday, 26 March.