In 2024, Mattia Carenini, who serves as the general manager of Matter of Trust Chile, used Petropelo hair booms in a stream located in Laguna Verde, which is a small town adjacent to Valparaíso, a coastal city. The greywater in the area contained oil and heavy metal pollutants from households and other businesses in the vicinity, and it was draining into the sea, thus providing an ideal scenario for testing a process that uses an extensively studied yet under-utilized property of hair, that is, its ability to soak up oil and heavy metals. In one month, as per the statement by Carenini, the booms collected 15 kg of pollutants from the water that flowed through them, according to El País, without independent verification from other sources.
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