Global Warming effect on Hair care Industry Essay

â€Å"It is the gradual increase of the temperature of the atmosphere near the earth’s surface as a result of the increase of what we call â€Å"greenhouse gases† since the industrial revolution. Those gases are, water vapor, Carbon Dioxide,Methane,Nitrous Oxides and Ozone† (â€Å"Global Warming† ). This phenomenon is considered a healthy natural procedure because, when the light from the sun hit the earth’s surface reflects off this surface toward space ,but doesn’t easily pass through the greenhouse gases blanket of the earth. Some of the sun’s light and heat are trapped keeping the planet at an average temperature suitable to life, which is about sixty degrees Fahrenheit(â€Å"Global Warming† ). As we said ,Global Warming as a natural process is not harmful, but the growth in industry,agriculture,transportation and technology revolution has produced additional quantities of greenhouse gases along with other harmful substances such as â€Å"Chlorofluorocarbons† or â€Å"The CFCs† (â€Å"Global Warming† ). That made earth’s atmosphere traps more heat and light than it is required, so earth is facing a dangerous future with scientists predictions of high temperature ages to be coming. Global warming has a long term effects on our planet. Some of those results are, Melting of polar ice with a resulting rise in sea level and coastal flooding; disruption of drinking water supplies ;profound changes in agriculture due to climate change; extinction of species as ecological niches disappear; and an increased of tropical diseases(Girardet 19). We may consider some global warming effect as following: †¢ Greenhouse gases are accumulating in earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing temperatures to rise. Global average temperatures warmed by about 1 ° F in the twentieth century and could increase by 2. 5 ° F to 10. 5 ° F in this century(Speth 56). †¢ Human-induced warming and sea-level rise are expected to continue throughout this century and into the next(Speth 56). †¢ This warming is caused by the cumulative effects of several greenhouse gases that have built up steadily in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, methane from fossil fuels and agricultural activities, nitrous oxide from agricultural activities and the chemical industry, and specialty chemicals including CFCs(Speth 56). †¢ Global warming could well have serious adverse societal and ecological impacts by the end of this century, and temperature and sea levels could also continue to rise well into the next century even if societies stabilize the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere(Speth 56) Hair care industry tools â€Å"Every woman knows how you look is essential to how you feel† (Make a date with your hair 73) No. 1 women magazine â€Å"Cosmopolitan† started an article with that word. Hair dressing is essential to all women on this planet. What ever you men laugh or criticize, they will still go to coiffures and hair dresser all over the world. Also men are not far from hair care. Men nowadays care a lot about how do they look like and hair look became essential for them too. More products are produced and invented every day to help those stylists to accomplish good looking hair cut and a soft ,long and strong hair texture for every woman. Every hair stylist, uses some essential products such as: †¢ Shampoos: They are used in washing and cleaning scalps and hair from dirt and moist. They remove unwanted amounts of oils with substances called â€Å"Surfactants† that produces foam. The most famous surfactants are, â€Å"Sodium Laureth Sulphate† and â€Å"Sodium lauryl sulphate†,which are written on every shampoo bottle. They considered harmful (Burke) . Some kinds of natural oils are used in making shampoos. Anti-dandruf kind of shampoos are using substances like Ketoconazole,Selenium sulfite or ZPT(Doctor NDTV). †¢ Conditioners: They are used in softening hair after washing it with shampoo. Conditioners coat the hair with protective material such as silicone making the hair feel softer, shiny and less likely to tangle. Silicones are the base substance in making conditioner along with natural oils such as shampoos(Burke ). †¢ Hair dryer, curling irons and hair crimpers: Those are electric devices used to dry wet and curling it using hot air blowout . They produce heat and consume more electricity ,and it may cause damage to hair if heat was high. Many kinds of those gadgets are designed to produce more heat to style thick strands of hair(Sloane ). †¢ Hair sprays and hair gels: These products are using many different kinds of polymers used to sustain the hair’s look and keep it stable (Make a date with your hair 73). †¢ Hair dyes: Products that are used to change the color of hair for many weeks. Bleaching is achieved by oxidation with â€Å"Hydrogen Peroxide† (Hocker and Popescu 36). †¢ Hair cut equipments: Like scissors,clippers,electric trimmers, brushes and combs. Every day millions of men and women all over the globe is cutting and brushing their hair. Every time that happen ,lots of hair are lost ,removed and thrown a way. Hair Chemistry â€Å"Biologically, hair is the filamentous appendage on the skin of mammals. Chemically, it is a composite material in which both the reinforcing fibers and the matrix are made of proteins† (Hocker and Popescu 36). Hair fibers, roughly cylindrical with diameters ranging from 10 µm to 100 µm, are multicellular tissues. The heart of the fiber is surrounded by the cuticle, made of plate-like overlapping cells whose heights can reach up to 1 µm. Each cuticle cell has four layers: the epicuticle; the a-layer; the exocuticle; and the endocuticle. Inside the cuticle, the cortex contains spindle-like interlocking cortical cells, with cell membrane complex in-between. Each cortical cell is composed of macrofibrils embedded in an intermacrofibrillar material. Each macrofibril consists of microfibrils, called the intermediate filaments (IF), themselves embedded in an intermicrofibrillar matrix composed of intermediate filament associated proteins (IFAP). Thus, hair is a composite material with a complex dual structure at all levels(Hocker and Popescu 36). In brief, elemental analysis of hair shows, remarkably independently of hair origin, 50wt% carbon, 7wt% hydrogen, 22wt% oxygen, 16wt% nitrogen and 5wt% sulfur(Hocker and Popescu 36). Global warming effects that relate to Hair care industry Global warming especially alarms bioenvironmentalists and social greens, because the three main greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) arise from core economic activities (automobile use, electricity generation, factories, agriculture, and deforestation),while the main consequences (rising seas, severe storms, drought, and desertification) are beyond the lifetimes of politicians and business leaders—perhaps occurring in 50 to 100 years. And the impacts, when they are most severe, will be mostly felt by the poor, marginalized peoples of the world. Obviously, lowering greenhouse gas emissions will involve major changes to global economic production and consumption patterns (Clapp and Dauvergne 39) not only hair care industry in the near future. It will require, too, governmental, corporate, and personal sacrifices. It’s known now that a huge part of earth’s warming is due to human activity. Humens are destroying the planet and global warming is one way for that. Global warming has many bad effects as we briefed earlyier. It’s more likely to discuss how hair care industry affecting the global warming . It what was announced by Al Gore, American former vise-president and Nobel Prize winner in Bali climate conference held this month that hair cuts and thrown away hair cutting decay, give massive amounts of green house gases, which contributes to the severe global warming crisis. They wanted us to go baldy (â€Å"Al Gore Finds New cause of Global Warming†). We will discuss how global warming affect the hair care industry with all the climate change criteria and harmful gases found in the air . A different point of view but a remarkable one to study. Environmental scientists predict that, from global warming of 0. 8 °Ã¢â‚¬â€œ2. 0 °C will â€Å"commit† 18–35 percent of animal and plant species â€Å"to extinction† by the middle of the twenty first century (Clapp and Dauvergne 35). Plants are the main source for natural oils and substances used in making hair products such as, Cacao extracts, Grape seed oil, roses, safflower and even bananas. Tropical plants are the most used in this industry. Global warming effect on those plants are very svere, so that hair care products are having problems in getting its raw mterials. Many surfactants for example are derived from plant oils like coconut or palm kernel (Hargreaves). Even if hair products company are saying they don’t use animals in their experiments, they still use them and with the bad effect of climate over different animal species, Those companies will not be able to develop their future products. Global warming is a result of what we called greenhouse gases(â€Å"Global warming†) . Some of them are harmful gases like,Cabon dioxide, nitrous oxides and Ozone(not the ozone type in the upper atmosphere). If we study the situation of every gas we may find that, higher concentrations of carbon dioxide—could mean an even higher rate of extinctions of animal and plants species, because they breathe Oxygen just like we do and as we said before that may lead to less natural products for hair care industry and less development to those products(Clapp and Dauvergne 54). In the air, nitrogen oxide from fossil fuel combustion reacts with volatile hydrocarbons and sunlight to produce smog, a nasty mix of photochemical oxidants, one of which is ozone (Speth 72) and according to hair chemical composition, hair absorbs moisture due to the polar amino acid residues of the inside of the hair (Hocker and Popescu 36), this cause harm to hair, which make it essential to repeat hair treatment processes and it may cause hair and scalp disease. Nitrogen Oxides can also become nitric acid and contribute to acid deposition through acid rains, which also contains harmful substances to hair health (Speth 45) . Acid rain is also a cause for water supply pollution due to rain falling on open water sources such as rivers and lakes, Polluting water sources may directly affect the hair care industry, due to the daily use of water in washing hair for probably every one. Acid rain coming from Nitrogen Oxides may pollute soil, forests, and crops (Speth 86) and of course making the same effect on plants and animals that are essential to hair care industry. Acid rains made thousands of lakes have â€Å"gone acid† (Speth 53), that means any kind of swimming of any of those lakes or water area contaminated by acids may cause hair loss or diseases. After a few years, scientists predict that global warming will cause shortage in universal water supplies . that may cause less water washing habits (Elsworth), less hygiene and of course it may cause diseases. Global warming is making the atmosphere on earth hotter than before (Girardet 19) and sunlight concentration is one of the most harmful effects on human’s health. Skin cancers are believed to be caused mainly by sunlight . Skin cancers may spread over the body even into hair scalp, causing severe hair loss (Armstrong 141-55). Losing hair for both men and women are emotionally destructive, so both of them may use hair wags or artificial hair parts to cover there baldness. Some kinds of skin rashes due to water or air pollution with green house gases may cause hair loss also(Doctor NDTV). Climate change ,high humidity ratios and long time sunlight effects are all factors that can injure the hair or make them very dry (Doctor NDTV)and of course that what would global warming do. Attitudes toward Global Warming and their effects Men and women and even Hair care companies started a new attitude in dealing with global warming and climate change problem. First of all, we must admit that hair care products with all their chemical materials, packaging bottles and even the misusage of these products are a big problem causing more and more environmental threats. Government started putting some regulations and laws to fight global warming increase . Hair products companies that still use harmful ingredients such as ,Sodium Laureth sulphate and sodium lauryl sulphate [they are found to be a cause for some kinds of cancers]( â€Å"SLES†),started searching for natural alternatives to use in shampoos, conditioners and any other products. Companies are increasingly becoming aware of environmental issues . Some companies are now trying to use technology in making hair products with excellent suspending power, low freezing point and wide thermal stability range(-5 ° C to 50 ° C) (Burke ),so that they may survive the global warming bad effects. Companies also targets to make new products with reduced environmental impact over the upcoming years, in an attempt to improve the environmental profile of its products and their packaging materials by reducing CO2 emissions, energy and water consumption used to make those products. Some of those companies continue with some environmental projects like Children’s Safe Drinking Water Program done by P&G hair Products Company (Product & supplier news). Governments also put under Current pressure to move away from non-renewable petroleum feed stocks and towards plants as sources of raw materials, which has led to a lot of effort on developing surfactants from oleo chemical feed stocks. Many recently-developed surfactants are an attempt to satisfy the modern consumers’ desire for products to be ‘more natural'(Hargreaves). The elimination of Chlorofluorocarbons (â€Å"Global Warming†) is also another effort to decrease the global warming effect not only on hair care industry but on any other human activity. Many people is trying to avoid using chemicals in their hair care regimes. Instead, they are using natural herbs and oils extracted from organic plants that is planted under observation to avoid pollution. Because of this hard effort to produce such substances, they are sold in high prices, not every one could be able to use those organic products. Also going to hair saloons became unadvisable from many environmental scientists, they are not environment friendly, which cause many to abandon those saloons and of course causing financial lost to many of those hair care branches. Maybe some hair saloons will only specialize in organic and natural products and because of the high prices of their products, only rich people will keep going to them. Bali Climate Change Conference (â€Å"Al Gore Finds New cause â€Å") declared that haircuts may raise green house gases amount. Maybe in the future, every body is going bald to avoid environmental crisis or even worse, we may be not able to even wash our hair, just like Cate Blanchett (Elsworth) is doing now. Climate is treating our hair badly, let’s all go baldy. Works Cited â€Å"Global Warming. â€Å"The Columbia Encyclopedia. 6th,New York. 2004. Clapp, Jennifer, and Peter Dauvergne. Paths to a Green World:The Political Economy of the Global Environment. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2005. Surviving the Century:Facing Climate Chaos and Other Global Challenges. Ed. Herbert Girardet. London: Earthscan, 2007. Speth, James. Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment. USA: Yale University Press, 2004.