You won't find it on the shelves at your local building supply store.

But human hair could soon become a common construction material.

A team of researchers at the University of Kentucky is studying how human hair, Canadian, repairing bridges, buildings and other structures.

Since the product development within Kentucky of the hemp fibers into fabrics and other applications that we can directly use.

We've started looking at other natural fibers, and hair was one of them.

And really we wanted to pick it up.

And then we're going to add that there.

Is still the advantage of hair is you don't need to process it to obtain the fiber.

We're going to just add the hair and keep mixing it to.

Also, hair is an item that ends up in landfills in general.

So most hair salons would be more than happy to pass it on to you.

We traveled many times with different binders, and it was it was a long process.

We'd start working with hair until the semester, pretty much.

We were just trying to see what is what is it has the best properties for the binder that's going to mix of the hair and make the best part we can.

That's a structural components which the same way we use glass fibers or carbon fibers and so on.

But it just happened to be human who produces that fly.

So once we get this all flattened out, we will take it to a in the oven and that will go in the oven at 95 Celsius, or it's about two or 3 hours.

I did not think I would be cooking here as a structural engineering student and thinking that would be part of it.

We have many combinations of binders that the students were developing and one of them would work in the field, basically.

So then that binder would hold the fabric with the human hair in place and the shape that we want, and then we can put concrete inside it to encase a pile that's damage or repair that's damage.

And so the nice thing about it, since it's fabric, you can shape it any way you want to.

We have a lot of concrete cylinders that we test using plastic molds that look like this.

So in the future we can make these and replace the plastic molds and it would be, you know, much more sustainable in.

The long run.

We were looking forward to finishing face to the in the next academic year.

And after that, we would have a proof of concept and a lot of testing data behind the the product that we can use in field applications.

Since this is so early, that could be we use a different binder that's that that's good for different other things.

And it can become, you know, bridge repair or or lost things.

This has has a lot of potential.

Weight for weight.

A strand of human hair is comparable in strength to steel.