photo: iStockphoto.com/Thinkstock
DCL
You may have heard this one before, but since I've had people ask me a number of times this year about which type of wine bottle stopper is best for the environment, natural cork or some alternative, a recent interview with Patrick Spencer of CorkReHarvest.org over at Mongabay seemed particularly apropos.
As Spencer explains:
Cork is renewable, sustainable, natural and environmentally friendly. It has been the closure of choice for 300 years. All of the great vintage wines that collectors have purchased or won at auction have been closed with natural cork. Recently, a very rare bottle of Bordeaux sold at auction for $25,000.00. The winner put their faith in that little piece of wood, that the bottle of wine was still drinkable. That should tell you something about cork.
Though aluminum can be recycled, aluminum screwcaps aren't. The plastic closure in the top of the cap and the size of the screwcap make it almost impossible to recycle. The mining for Bauxite, from which aluminum is made, remains one of the most environmentally harmful mining practices in the world. The production of screwcaps gives off 24 times more greenhouse gasses than producing one cork as well as using 10 times more energy.
Unlike natural corks, many synthetic wine closures are made from materials that are not biodegradable and are not sustainably sourced. Disadvantages of synthetic corks include; a difficulty in extracting them from the bottle, the inability to use the plastic cork to reseal the wine, and that some can also impart a slight chemical flavor to the wine.
The stats on cork...
CO2 emissions per 1000: Aluminum screwtop: 37.161 grams, Plastic stopper 14.716 grams, Natural cork 1.437 grams. That's means natural cork has about one-twentieth the emissions of aluminum, and about one tenth of plastic.
Granted, in the course of the life of the individual bottle of wine, the amount of carbon the stopper choice adds to the bottle is negligible, but that figure is really indicative of corks other benefits, beyond the superior recyclability mentioned in the quote.
First of all, oak cork trees (Quercus suber) are not chopped down to get the cork. Rather the cork is harvested by hand every nine years. The trees themselves can live up to 300 years.
The cork industry--spread out over 6.6 million acres in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia--employs some 100,000 people.
That 6.6 million acres is one of the world's most biodiverse regions--"second only to the Amazon rainforest," Spencer points out--and is one of the UN's 25 Biodiversity Hotspots. It's home to the Iberian Lynx (the world's most endangered cat), as well as numerous other endemic and migratory species.
Read more: Mongabay
Find out more about cork recycling: CorkReHarvest
