SAN FRANCISCO — The Presidio national park has welcomed a group of eco-volunteers to compost a huge pile of human hair mats they used to clean oily San Francisco beaches in the wake of the fuel oil spill earlier this month.

Lisa Gautier, along with a group of surfers, neighbors and guerrilla activists, used the hair mats to soak up oil that had washed ashore when the Cosco Busan container ship sideswiped a tower of the Bay Bridge.

They plan to harvest oyster mushrooms on the mats to turn the pile into compost — a process that takes about three months.

Now Gautier just needs to wade through some red tape.

She needs permission from the owner of the wayward ship to take the collected waste from a storage facility in Oakland and compost some of it in one of the nation's most picturesque parks. Gautier estimates she can get rid of five 55-gallon drums of waste.

She may need a permit from the state Department of Toxic Substances Control to handle the fuel if tests determine the oil is hazardous. Test results are expected in about a week.

There's a chance the collected fuel won't test hazardous, according to Andrew Bertha-Hicks, a California hazardous substances engineer. In that case, Gautier is free to compost with city permission.

"I'm getting a lot of help from the city expediting the permit process, but I just need that green light," Gautier said.

While the Coast Guard was keeping beach cleanup volunteers without toxic substance training away from the shores, more than 700 people were so taken with hair mat bioremediation that they went ahead and cleaned up oil with them anyway.

Many got training eventually.

"This whole thing was so grassroots, and people really thought it was something they could do to help," Gautier said. "Everybody has hair and people are really ready right now to be in touch with something that is back to basics."

Until now, Gautier, who runs a nonprofit, Matter of Trust, that routes donated business castoffs to needy causes, was searching for a place to compost the mats.

"What she's doing sounds like a good fit with what the Presidio already does — we are committed to alternative methods for landscaping and using nontoxic systems," said Presidio spokeswoman Dana Polk.

Gautier had 1,000 human hair mats on hand when the ship spilled 58,000 gallons of fuel into the bay.

Until she found an emergency use for the hair mats, Gautier collected human hair from Bay Area salons and sent it to Georgia to be woven into mats, which she then gave to the San Francisco Department of the Environment to absorb used motor oil.