Cheers! Now You Can Recycle Your Wine Corks |
Published by Joe Gillach under Sustainability
Used wine bottle corks. Never give them much thought. After the corkscrew does its job, I simply throw corks away or find some arcane use, like guarding the tips of scissors or stabilizing a wobbly table leg. So I’ll confess skepticism when I read about a new environmental organization formed to promote the recycling of wine corks, ReCORK America.
What’s next? I wondered. Single-stream recycling for toothpaste caps, shoelaces, or those unnecessary rubber bands around the daily newspaper?
To dig a little deeper, I called up ReCORK’s head of public relations, Roger Archey, who also happens to be the West Coast marketing head for Amorim, the world’s third largest manufacturer of cork stoppers, selling over three billion annually.
Archey piqued my sustainability interests when he mentioned that Amorim was the first natural cork supplier in the world to receive FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certification in 2007. Because natural cork is a renewable resource—the stripped cork bark regrows in 10 to 12 years while the trees can live 150 years—it has environmental advantages over the plastic stopper and metal screwcap alternatives.
A PricewaterhouseCoopers life cycle analysis published a last week showed that carbon dioxide emissions of screwcaps are 24 times higher than natural cork stoppers, and plastic stoppers produce 10 times more CO2 than natural cork stoppers. The research, commissioned by Amorim, compared the performance of cork stoppers versus aluminum screwcaps and plastic stoppers on seven key environmental indicators. Cork won on six of seven dimensions, placing second to aluminum closures only on water consumption.
Archey was starting to turn me into a believer. And not just me—organic groceries giant Whole Foods recently partnered with ReCORK on a six-month trial in which customers at 25 Northern California Whole Foods stores may drop off their corks for recycling.
“Frankly, the public doesn’t think too much about the world of closures,” Archey confessed, referring to the industry term for wine bottle caps. It turns out that more than 13 billion corks are manufactured worldwide every year, along with stoppers for billions of plastic and aluminum bottles. This all adds up to a whole lot of unnecessary landfill that slips below the public’s radar.
Wine and champagne corks are often the one souvenir that people keep to commemorate benchmark events such as birthdays, anniversaries, promotions, and even funerals. Hang onto these—but know that ReCORK aims to get his hands on as many of the remaining corks as possible.
Despite the arcane nature of ReCORK’s recycling effort, Archey says that people are responding with enthusiasm. He recently received a call from a Florida couple who wanted to recycle their collection of 750 corks that they began amassing back in 1954 to commemorate the milestones in their marriage. (That’s nearly 14 milestones per year—perhaps one secret to a happy marriage.)
The French American International School in San Francisco recently tallied the 100,000th cork in their collection. Archey was invited to the school ceremony, where officials proudly handed over to him the latest batch of 20,000 corks gathered by students—presumably with their parents’ assistance—from local restaurants, hotels and wine bars. Très bien!
ReCORK is also focused on higher volume opportunities, capturing used and surplus corks from winery tasting rooms, bottling lines, and quality assurance laboratories. In addition, they are establishing more collection locations with key retailers and restaurants in larger metropolitan areas.
Today the ReCORK program ships most of its harvest back to Portugal, where they are ground up by Amorim. The resulting material goes to manufacturers of flooring tiles, building insulation, shoe soles, fishing rod handles, bulletin boards, place mats, gaskets, and packaging materials. Ground recycled cork even figures as an ingredient in soil compost. In time, Amorim hopes to develop California-based uses for recycled cork, to reduce the expense and carbon-load of overseas shipping. Looks like solid Cradle to Cradle thinking to me.
Amorim hopes the recycling campaign may grow a way to start a dialogue directly with consumers about cork closures. That would be a big change from the past, when only wine critics cared about wine stoppers.
Having lost 20% market share to plastic and metal alternatives in recent years, natural cork producers are looking for ways to educate consumers about the green benefits of their product. By promoting the recyclability of cork, Amorim hopes to encourage consumers to think about both the ecological and authenticity value of natural cork. Archey points out the inconsistency in creating an organic wine, only to “close it with a petroleum plug.”
The cork recycling campaign mounted by Amerim, and now embraced by Whole Foods, is anything but profitable; it will be some time before it breaks even. “It is mostly about doing good, one cork at a time,” Archey says.
I’ll drink to that!
Additional sources:
latimes.com
wisegeek.com
pbs.org
treehugger.com
professorshouse.com
26 Responses to “Cheers! Now You Can Recycle Your Wine Corks”
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For the Ferry commuters I noticed this location: “Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant” would make it easy to drop off corks. Now if I can just convince them it’s really not ALL that much wine.
Me, too, I’ll drink to that. Bring on the wine!
Nancy
Good point on recycling. The recycling locations are too far away from the Bronx but there is still some open land where the corks I accumulate could go for a rest.
[...] tonight, I discovered ReCork America through the Green by Design blog. ReCork America is a program created with the sole goal of obtaining and recycling natural [...]
Yet another use for your popped champagne corks…the annual champagne chair design from Design Within Reach.
Here’s what I received in an email from them today:
Uncork your potential by entering the DWR Champagne Chair Contest.
You have until January 9 to create an original miniature chair using only
the foil, label, cage and cork from no more than two Champagne bottles.
Embrace that “I will not procrastinate” resolution and get busy. You could
win an Emeco Morgans Chair, an exclusive DWR introduction that was designed
by Andrée Putman.
A very happy new year to you.
Learn More > http://news.dwr.com/rd/9z1zig6jdsljscq11rb5gqdurg19u113sb73m7o4tlg
Cheers! Martha
I love this article! I’ve been sending my old corks to my daughter in law who is a Sommelier, she wants to make a table with them. It’s great to know that there are other recycling places when this project is finished! Thank you, Jill Love the chair design project!
How do I post this to facebook?
Hi Jill, the easiest way is to post it your Facebook wall.
Since the URL of blog posts can be long, you can always shorten it using TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com. Just cut and paste the URL of the blog on their site, and they’ll return a nifty short one that’s easier to handle.
Have fun and thanks for putting the word out! Martha
[...] Green By Design » Cheers! Now You Can Recycle Your Wine Corks Posted on April 15, 2009 by petalice Green By Design » Cheers! Now You Can Recycle Your Wine Corks. [...]
popurls.com // popular today…
story has entered the popular today section on popurls.com…
Wow that’s pretty incredible, every little bit helps I gues.
Any one have a Zombie plan? Zombie Plans | YourZombiePlan.com
I could be way off here, but how exactly is this recycling? It just sounds like the worlds third largest manufacturer of corks found a way to squeeze a little more money out their product. I hate to be that guy, but aside from the sustainability of the cork plant itself, me sending my used corks to the company that made them, to have them ship them to Portugal to be sold to secondary manufacturers doesn’t sound very sustainable to me.
Not to mention, this article fails to include the major contributing factor to the decision to use screw top wine closures, which is price. At the moment, cork is incredibly expensive when compared to plastic or metal screw tops, and even synthetic cork. It allows far greater flexibility of the price point of a given wine. And I, myself tend to stay in the sub-$15 range unless I’ve got something to celebrate, so that’s pretty important to me.
I like saving my own corks for later use with old bottles I find
Perhaps before publishing another puff piece for Amorium you should read “To Cork or Not to Cork” by George M Taber (Scribner). It explains why top end wineries are moving away from corks.
They are trying to escape the loss of thousands of bottles of wine because of tainted corks. Tens of Thousands of bottles of wine being dumped in the landfill because they are corked (infected with TCA) is hardly “green”.
Amorium cannot ship 100% taint free corks and so Amorium corked bottles get dumped by the thousands each year.
The cork companies have embarked on a global PR campaign to discredit other closures because they have no solution for TCA
Please read the book it would be a great starting point for real “digging deeper”.
The reCorking effort is admirable and I support it 100%. But please tell me where I send my technical corks and plastic ones which have become a solution for delivering an untainted wine to muy table.
Cheers,
ZZ
[...] it out here:http://greenbydesign.com/2008/12/22/cheers-now-you-can-recycle-your-wine-corks/ Tags: cheers, corkscrew, environmental organization, job, recycling, scissors, skepticism, table [...]
Hey, great site. Have to make a small request, can you please not use theplanet.com as a web host, they are a network abusers wet dream (so are on a few auto block lists (including mine).
So, sadly I won’t be back to look around more as it’s not worth the list editing, but thanks for the good work getting people thinking about creative ways to use (former) trash.
[...] source:http://greenbydesign.com/2008/12/22/cheers-now-you-can-recycle-your-wine-corks/ Tags: cheers, corkscrew, environmental organization, job, recycling, scissors, skepticism, table [...]
[...] environmental organization formed to promote the recycling of wine corks…Get the low-down here:http://greenbydesign.com/2008/12/22/cheers-now-you-can-recycle-your-wine-corks/ Posted by Andy B at [...]
[...] sounds a little too narrow and “boutique green” to change the planet, but as the folks at Green By Design point out, there is a little more to the story: A PricewaterhouseCoopers life cycle analysis [...]
[...] Cheers! Now You Can Recycle Your Wine Corks From the page: Used wine bottle corks. Never give them much thought. After the corkscrew does its job, I simply throw corks away or find some arcane use, like guarding the tips of scissors or stabilizing a wobbly table leg. So Ill confess skepticism when I read about a new environmental organization formed to promote the recycling of wine corks…Link:http://greenbydesign.com/2008/12/22/cheers-now-you-can-recycle-your-wine-corks/ [...]
[...] a new environmental organization formed to promote the recycling of wine corks…Check it out here:http://greenbydesign.com/2008/12/22/cheers-now-you-can-recycle-your-wine-corks/ Publicado por ChickyWicky en [...]
[...] a new environmental organization formed to promote the recycling of wine corks…Check it out here:http://greenbydesign.com/2008/12/22/cheers-now-you-can-recycle-your-wine-corks/ (Leave a [...]
[...] Green By Design » Cheers! Now You Can Recycle Your Wine Corks (tags: wine green recycling) [...]
In college I was planning on making a raft out of corks, but couldn’t figure out a way to get them to stay together.
I see there is one merchant in my home state of NJ but too bad its a 2 hour drive. Hopefully more wine merchants get on board with this initiative.