Wine Cork Recycling
We just sent off our most recent collection of wine corks to be recycled, six boxes in total weighing 245 pounds! Our wine cork recycling campaign has been ongoing for over a year now, and in 2022 we shipped over 350 pounds of natural cork to ReCORK to be recycled. If you’ve been keeping up with our efforts, have you been asking yourself “Where are those things going?” or “What purpose does it serve?”. Today’s blog dives into answering those questions, and perhaps some you didn’t even know you had!
Let’s start with where the wine cork comes from. Natural wine corks are made from the bark of the Cork Oak Tree. Unlike most other resources we derive from trees, the Cork Oak itself is not cut down during the cork harvesting process. Instead the outer layer of bark is peeled away, and the tree continues growing and rebuilding the lost bark. The Cork Oak Trees that have their bark harvested can actually absorb 3 to 5 times more CO2 than those Cork Oaks that don’t. Cork Oak forests are actually ranked as the second highest in biodiversity, next to the Amazon Rainforest! Once the sheet of bark is harvested, the small cylinder is punched out, forming what we all know as a wine cork. The remnants of the bark sheet are ground up and compressed into what are called “agglomerated” corks, which are still natural and are still fine for recycling through ReCORK.
Above: A Cork Oak Forest
So, you’ve emptied a bottle of wine (or two), and now what? Instead of tossing that cork in the trash, let’s think about prolonging its life before the landfill. You can bring them to our Keep Charleston Beautiful office for recycling. Our drop site is located at 823 Meeting Street, and the public is welcome to drop off natural cork during regular business hours. Pro Tip: It’s more economical and environmentally friendly if you wait until you have a decent quantity before driving them over to us.
We collect the corks here at our building, until we have enough to completely fill a large box. We then ship them off to ReCORK to handle the actual transformative processes. ReCORK takes the corks they receive and grinds them down into a raw material that can replace petroleum-based foam and plastic. The ground cork can be turned into the soles of footwear (think Birkenstocks), flooring tiles, building insulation, and a number of other uses dreamed up by environmentally conscious companies. Take a look at the full process portrayed in the diagram below.
One natural cork wine stopper actually captures enough carbon during its creation to offsets the carbon footprint of the entire glass wine bottle. In recent years, we have seen an increase in synthetic corks and metal screw tops. Screw caps and synthetic cork tops actually create 9 to 24 times more CO2 emissions in their creation when compared to that of natural cork. Confused what the different is between natural and synthetic cork? The photo below is a good representation of the visual differences between the two types. The synthetic corks look and feel more like a foam or rubber, and are not accepted by ReCORK for recycling. Please be sure to sort these out of the corks you bring to Keep Charleston Beautiful.
As a final note, shipping our corks off for recycling is a cost that we cover ourselves. Our last shipment of cork cost us $665 to mail, so that’s about $100/box. While we do bring in small amounts of revenue from our other recycling collection campaigns, it unfortunately does not cover the full cost of this shipping expense.
If you are a frequent participant in our collection program, or if you often bring us large quantities of cork to recycle, please consider donating a small amount to help cover some of the shipping costs. Donations can be made via our non-profit webpage, FriendsofKCB.org. You can also use the button below, which will take you directly to the donation page.
Moving forward, let’s rethink what we throw out, and continue exploring new ways we can prolong the life of the resources we use, no matter how small. Okay, okay, we’ll put a cork in it for now!