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Cheers to ReCork! Recycling Wine Corks
By Kitty | December 23, 2008
My husband and I have been saving our wine corks since we moved into the house where we now live. That’s about 4 and a half years… and we’ve accumulated quite a few corks. Winos, no. But we do like wine. The original intention was for me to create some craft out of the saved wine corks–perhaps a chess board… or a huge cork board… or even just some spiraling wall-mounted wall art to hang above our wine rack. Almost five years later, there’s still no such artwork, yet we have plenty of corks.
Then, 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 cork. According to their website,
The website explains,
While ReCork America appears to only be in California at the moment, they recently created a partnership with Whole Foods Markets to recycle wine corks. This gives me hope that once the program becomes profitable, it won’t take long for it to spread to the east coast. At which point, I will feel much better that I’ve saved my corks all these years… AND it will give me another reason to collect real corks from friends and family. I will just have to create some sort of chess-board or wall art with the artificial corks. Too bad those don’t look as cool as the real thing. Oh well. The Earth comes first and the way I see it, every little bit helps when it comes to doing your part to reduce, reuse, or recycle.
Kudos to ReCork, and I hope to see the program or a similar one on the east coast soon. I’m excited at all of the progress that is being made toward recycling everything possible. If everyone continues to make that effort and spread it to everyone they know, soon our world will be a better place. I’ll pop a cork to that!
Topics: Daily Update, Loving the Earth | 1 Comment »
January 5th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Kitty,
Thank you for your kind words about ReCORK America. Given the fact that there are over 13 billion natural wine corks sold into the world market each year, the opportunities for reuse as new products are excellent.
Our Web site (www.recorkamerica.com) lists several cork recycling sites on the East Coast: New Jersey @ http://www.terracycle.net and PA @ korks4kids.com are two options closer to home.
Natural cork is the perfect recycling material. When you turn a wine cork into flooring material, a bulletin board, or any number of other cork products, you extend the useful life-cycle of that cork for many more years to come. Sustainability is the key concept here.
Cheers and Happy New Year!
Roger Archey
Program Manager
ReCORK America