Is Natural Cork Environmentally Friendly?

You are familiar with cork. You probably have some in your home right now, whether in the form of a wine bottle stopper, a message board or maybe even on your kitchen floor. Do you really know what cork is, where it comes from or whether it is environmentally friendly? The answer to these questions depends on whether you use synthetic cork, which is made of plastic or real cork, which is renewable, recyclable and biodegradable.

Natural cork comes from cork oak trees. Cork oak trees grow primarily in forests in Algeria, France, Italy, Morocco, North Africa, Portugal and Spain. These hardy evergreen oaks have unique, thick bark that protects them from dangers in the environments in which they grow, such as fire, drought and drastic temperature changes. Cork oak trees often live for 150 to 250 years.

You may wonder whether natural cork is really more environmentally friendly than synthetic cork, since it comes from the bark of a tree. The aspect of harvesting cork that makes it such a green option is that cork oak trees are not cut down in order to gather the cork.

Once a cork oak tree reaches approximately 25 years of age, cork is harvested from it. Expert cork harvesters use machetes to carefully strip wide ribbons of the bark from the trees without damaging the protective membrane between the bark and the wood. This allows the tree to live and continue producing bark for many years.

Although cork harvesters must wait eight to 15 years to harvest cork once a tree has been stripped, each tree can be harvested dozens of times in its life. A cork oak tree can provide as much as 440 pounds of cork in a prime year, which is enough to make approximately 25,000 corks. Wine corks are punched from the strips of bark, and then the cork is ground up, molded into slabs and used to produce corkboards, cork flooring and other cork products.

Natural cork is a renewable product without the potential for harmful consequences to which petroleum-based synthetic cork is predisposed. There are even organizations such as ReCork that upcycle used wine corks to make everything from parts of shoes to gaskets to packaging materials.

So why do so many wineries employ synthetic bottle stoppers? Plastic corks prevent wine taint and may be easier to remove. If those reasons do not seem sufficient to you, take a stand and let your favorite brands know you prefer natural cork in your bottles of wine.

Go to the Cork Quality Council website to use their Carbon Footprint Calculator for Wine Closures. Sign the 100% Cork Petition at 100PercentCork.org or "Like" their Facebook page. Finally, visit ReCork.org to learn how you can become involved with recycling natural cork.