The Barber Lounge – A Green Salon

Eco Author | 5:51 pm | July 6, 2009 | Service and Supplier, Spa

Photo Credit: Gavin Hynes

As part of their mission, The Barber Lounge is committed to full, general recycling. This San Francisco salon recycles all hair color foils in addition to collecting cut hair for use as either compost or for matteroftrust.org. Matter of Trust partners with salons and uses hair clippings swept off their floors to create “hair mats.” Woven into these mats, hair is an efficient and abundant material for collecting and containing petroleum oil spills. The salon is also the first salon in San Francisco to use solar power. It is in process of adhering 4000 Watts of Solar Panels to the Salon roof and routing to a power inverter that takes the solar power and converts to AC house power. The installation simply plugs into the salon’s existing electrical system. The solar electric system will generate 28% of the salon’s energy using the Sun’s rays for the next 30 years without any moving parts. As a team, all Barber Lounge employees recently walked as part of San Francisco’s Earth Day celebration. “The environment has always been very important to me,” says Barber Lounge owner Greg Griffin. “When I opened my salon I kept the environment and our carbon footprint in mind. We use Aveda products and they have a “cradle to cradle” mission statement meaning all their products are sustainable and safe for the environment from the bottle to the drain. It’s becoming increasingly more important for business’s to be mindful of how they impact the world we live in.”