Recently spent a week travelling through Portugal. Saw a lot of cork-based trinkets for tourists. Didn't realise cork was such a fundamental part of Portuguese culture.
Also didn't realise it was fire resistant!
I am now intrigued by the possibilities of what we could make with this spongy wood.
But at over 40 years until it's harvestable, it doesn't look like I'll be reaping the rewards of planting my own cork trees any time soon.
Are there any ways to support existing cork farms and invest in new plantations?
Who thinks of his grandchildren plants a cork tree.
The best way to support is not to fund mega touristic projects / intensive farming or solar projects that cause cork trees to either "disappear" or die magically. Cork trees are protected by law.
For non-Portuguese: the eucalypt refers to eucalyptus plantations, the wood being used for paper production. They are a disaster for native species and also extremely susceptible to forest fires.
Which is a nice saying, but also points in the direction that those who reap the benefits from this industry are the ones who got lucky to inherit land from their ancestors.
While it's definitely a cultural mark of Portugal, that represents work and sustain in some regions, it's also a mark of wealth.
A lot of the shifts you see, are just people looking for other ways to leverage their lottery land for more wealth gains - usually the fines are worth paying for the short term returns.
They should be held accountable for the luck they had - should be a privilege, not a right.
Haven't had time to read the article (yet)—but I'm hoping the headline means those soulless synthetic corks that I'm always disappointed to find when peeling away the foil of an otherwise enjoyable bottle of wine will be disappearing.
I haven't seen one in the UK for a few years now, I'm happy to say. I really don't see the point. If you don't want to use a cork, screw caps are a thing.
I actually would rather synthetic or screw tops, but I'm mostly into whisk(e)y not wine. Corks can fail way more than other options. I do like a nice cork pop though.
Plus cork taint is no fun (yes, that happens with whiskey too, it's a myth it can't)
Also another down side of spirits being capped with a cork is that at higher ABVs they can slowly disolve the cork ... (Not sure when that starts to happen, but I believe 40% ABV can)
Just to make sure I increase knowledge, cork taint is a very specific thing, it's from a chemical called TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole) not just something corks do.
Agglomerated corks like DIAM tend to be preferable for wine, as they are processed to remove TCA (which is responsible for “corked” wine). Natural cork is not actually that great because of the presence of TCA and the natural variance in oxygen permeability, which is not very helpful when storing wine for a long time.
The synthetic corks became more popular because cork taint, a fungal infection, became more frequent. They've figured out a way to prevent it, so natural cork should make more of a comeback.
Cork oaks are a beautiful, evergreen oak tree with lovely leaves and a magnificent trunk. They grow well in the warmer parts of California. There are a few places in the state that sell mature specimens. I have 3 on my property and I would highly recommend!
"For every single tonne of cork produced we are talking about 73 tonnes of CO2 that are captured... 392g (13.8oz) of carbon is sequestered by every cork stopper"
This might be an obvious point but it's not that cork material itself is carbon friendly, but having robust demand for cork ensures proliferation cork oaks that can sequester CO2.
Tonne is a mass measurement... How can 1 tonne store 73 tonnes of CO2?
The source of that fact is here [0], but that is counting the forest that makes the cork. However they aren't growing a new forest for new cork, so that 73 tonnes of stored carbon is static. Each cork harvest lowers that 73:1 ratio.
The article makes it pretty clear (cork forests aren't cut down for harvesting):
> Planting forests is a commonly used approach to offset carbon emissions by polluting industries, but when the trees are harvested they are usually cut down and much of their stored carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
> But cork oaks are one of the few commercial forests not felled for harvesting. This means the cork tree's carbon storage capacity keeps increasing during the 200 or more years the trees can live.
> Most of the carbon remains locked in the tree as it continues to grow. Although cork products contain some of the absorbed carbon, they can have a long life after being cut from the tree. Cork can be recycled and is slow to break down even when discarded.
I believe the trees continue to grow over the intervening near-decade between harvests, sequestering CO2 not only in the part of the bark that is harvested (which sounds like it is potentially only a meter or two off the ground) but also as new growth along the rest of the tree. I suppose that that statement implies that, on average, they harvest 1/73rd of the growth that a tree has had since the previous harvest.
(Note I am not attempting to state whether that claim is true or not, merely offering one potential explanation of how the trees might sequester 73 tonnes CO2 for every tonne of cork harvested)
You don't need to store CO2. You need to store the carbon somewhere and get some O2 for free.
There's about 2.5g of oxygen per 1g of carbon in carbon dioxide, and carbon takes the lion's share of hydrocarbons' mass, so I wouldn't be surprised if just the cork itself would burn to twice its weight in CO2. Then you consider the growth of the tree itself over time. Oak is about 3-4x the density of cork, so I wouldn't be surprised if you got a few grams of wood per gram of cork.
That 70x multiplier is enormous and probably overinflated, but these are just two factors I could think of in a couple of minutes, so I can easily see how a tree, over its lifetime, might sink 10-20 tonnes of carbon per 1 tonne of cork produced.
In Australia where I am the insidious Stelvin type screw cap (aka the Pewsey cap so named after the wine district where it was first introduced) has almost taken over from the traditional cork stoppers: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw_cap_(wine)
The Stelvin cap is both a blessing and a curse, bottles can be opened dead easily with just a quick twist of its screw cap which makes it highly convenient (especially so when one misplaces one's traditional cork screw as so often happens). It's also very handy for resealing bottles that have been only partially consumed.
For me, the Selvin cap is also somewhat of a curse because I no longer have access to a reliable source of used corks which I use for a multitude of diffetent jobs—of which one of the most important is capping sharp tools.
Before the Selvin screw cap was introduced some decades ago, the quality of corks used in bottling wine in this country started to fall below par and the reason was that the demand for wine suddenly shot up in the 1980s. The quality of wine corks was pretty terrible, they'd either crumble or break into pieces when one was extracting them, or they'd leak or not seal properly and the wine would either age prematurely or it'd go off (oxidize) whilst still in the bottle.
Effectively, both the cork shortage and the concomitant price hikes for corks set the scene for the mass takeover by the Selvin screw cap.
Interesting, I assume you're talking about porcelain flip-tops.[0] I can't say I've ever seen sparkling wine bottled that way. Though, I don't live in Australia or, for that matter, drink much sparkling.
One reason a lot of wine bottles have plastic stoppers or screw tops is that cork tree habitats in Portugal have been shrinking. Also cork trees are slow to grow so it's hard to ramp up production quickly. And using cork for one time use packaging (wine bottle stoppers) is maybe not the most sustainable use of the material.
Unless you are buying century old vintage Port's which 99% of casual wine drinkers are not, then this is silly argument for most commercial bottles being produced in the last decades.
The main push for plastic caps, is in markets who are not usual wine drinkers. And it is mostly driven by lower cost of plastic vs cork, and probably the marketing barrier that many people don't actual know/want how to use a cork screw.
> Unless you are buying century old vintage Port's which 99% of casual wine drinkers are not, then this is silly argument for most commercial bottles being produced in the last decades.
You don’t need to buy century old vintage for that to be an issue. Just a few years will do the trick.
Which is why winemakers dislike cork: cork leads to product loss, it’s used for the cachet, and when possibly they use hybrid / layered corks with higher reliability.
Citation desperately needed! Cork allows for an air exchange which no other artificial material does.
I don't know a single Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese winemaker that even sells without cork. The only _exceptions_ to this are when they sell to retail supermarkets in northern Europe or US for whom they sometimes cap it with metal.
> Cork allows for an air exchange which no other artificial material does.
Air exchange is the one thing you least want, it means oxidation. The entire point of the cork is to keep air out. Air is the enemy.
> I don't know a single Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese winemaker that even sells without cork.
Again, because of the cachet of cork. Most buyers don’t even know what they’re drinking. Plastic and metal caps feel cheap, therefore buyers don’t want them.
As someone who lived in Spain for a decade or so and now spends a couple or months a year in Italy.. I'm not sure how you have arrived that opinion.
Perhaps your taste is a little more expensive than what I see on supermarket shelves there, but a significant quantity of bottled wines don't use real cork stoppers.
Fun fact, actual old growth natural forests are carbon neutral. The trees sequester the same amount of co2 as is released by various fungi and other organisms that break down dead trees.
However, commercial forests that are harvested every few decades (depending on species) and their wood locked up in various products like paper, furniture or buildings store co2 for the lifetime of the object. If the resulting object is at the end of its useful life put in a landfill (underground) that prevents decomposition, co2 is locked for a very long time.
Tldr. / Commercial forests are better for "the climate" that old growth. Dumping organic matter in deep landfills is better that composting for the same. Mind blown!
This is a very one dimensional analysis, and your conclusion that commercial forests are better for the climate than old growth is wrong. Commercial forests fuck up the biodiversity in that region. Natural forests foster biodiversity, which in turn increases the resilience of the region to negative effects of climate change. Furthermore, it has been shown that natural forests are better at sequestrating CO2 than commercial forests.
There are many more points to be brought up here, but I will leave at this for the sake of brevity =)
- As you said, time scale: Forests and their ecosystem take a long time to form. Much longer time horizons that we are dealing with with climate change
- Strictly, yes, growing a tree and harvesting it and putting the harvested wood somewhere in a bunker removes carbon from the atmosphere. But in reality, the harvested wood is processed, and there's a lot of carbon emissions associated with that. Furthermore, it's not stored for thousands of years. It's e.g. used as paper, and then recycled or burned or whatever.
- A forest is not just trees. There's a whole ecosystem, including soil, fungi, animals, insects, different species of trees and plants. This has many benefits to the biodiversity and resilience of that region, that also counter-acts climate change. Tree plantations on the other hand, are just one type of tree, that often are not even native to the that region. Tree plantations destroy ecosystems, so even if the carbon negative argument would be valid (it's not), this would not be a good idea.
I'm going to be a little skeptic and say that part of the article reads like an ad. Cork exploration is certantly less destructive than the high intensity water hungry olive and almond farms, the green houses in protected areas or the high end condos in the dunes that have been showing up through Alentejo. Maybe it's even the best balance we can get between some need for profitability and vaguely natural land, but I have very strong doubts about some of the language used in the article. Some examples:
"This traditional type of management is not disruptive to biodiversity, which has adapted and endures because of it. The wild species that inhabit these areas no longer have alternatives, and so will be at risk if the Montado land-use is changed."
Alentejo as seen the influence of man in transforming the landscape for thousands of years. This type of management was likely very disruptive. biodiversity adapted and the one that didn't is gone. Most of the times we can't even see the problem simply because the bodies of the extinct species decomposed and left no trace. Wolves are gone, vultures are gone, wild boars are a problem due to the lack of natural predators and most land is fenced which is a huge problem to any kind of bigger wild life that needs to move around.
From what I've learned cork trees were heavily trimmed during the fifties due to the need for wood making them a lot smaller than they could be and so storing a lot less carbon. So things are very disruptive but sometimes it's just not in a time scale we can notice, or feel and responsability for it.
"Material scientists in Amorim's iCork lab are also experimenting by combining cork with rubber and bio-based or biodegradable polymers to develop other new uses including injection moulding."
So it's an experiment in making composites of cork and plastic that will probably be impossible to recycle and will take a long take to degrade in realistic conditions. Not saying that those material aren't needed I just really think this wording is trying to deceive people into thinking this is something it's not.
> Cork exploration is certantly less destructive than the high intensity water hungry olive and almond farms, the green houses in protected areas or the high end condos in the dunes that have been showing up through Alentejo.
I'll counter your skepticism by saying you're just not skeptical enough.
We are the society that is banning straws while completely ignoring fishing nets. We are the society banning single-use bags, while selling you garbage bags and ignoring plastics in packaging.
We are not interested in actually solving any of these issues, just making small tweaks - as inefficient as possible - that allow us to feel good on social media.
> We are the society that is banning straws while completely ignoring fishing nets.
It's quite easy to drink a drink without a straw - quick easy win.
Fishing without nets requires more thought and retooling. You do what you can do.
Similar single use shopping bags clear were a scourge - near me before the ban they used to festoon trees. Shopping bags can easily be reused. Reusing bin bags is much more difficult. Here in the UK plastic in packaging is a high-profile issue - particularly food packaging.
55 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadAlso didn't realise it was fire resistant!
I am now intrigued by the possibilities of what we could make with this spongy wood.
But at over 40 years until it's harvestable, it doesn't look like I'll be reaping the rewards of planting my own cork trees any time soon.
Are there any ways to support existing cork farms and invest in new plantations?
Quem pensa nos filhos planta um pinheiro.
Quem pensa nos netos planta um sobreiro.
-------------------
Who thinks of himself plants an eucalyptus.
Who thinks of his children plants a pine tree.
Who thinks of his grandchildren plants a cork tree.
The best way to support is not to fund mega touristic projects / intensive farming or solar projects that cause cork trees to either "disappear" or die magically. Cork trees are protected by law.
Olivais dos meus pais.
Montados dos meus antepassados.
---
Which is a nice saying, but also points in the direction that those who reap the benefits from this industry are the ones who got lucky to inherit land from their ancestors.
While it's definitely a cultural mark of Portugal, that represents work and sustain in some regions, it's also a mark of wealth.
A lot of the shifts you see, are just people looking for other ways to leverage their lottery land for more wealth gains - usually the fines are worth paying for the short term returns.
They should be held accountable for the luck they had - should be a privilege, not a right.
Still going strong (just a bit darkened by handling)!
Plus cork taint is no fun (yes, that happens with whiskey too, it's a myth it can't)
Also another down side of spirits being capped with a cork is that at higher ABVs they can slowly disolve the cork ... (Not sure when that starts to happen, but I believe 40% ABV can)
Thanks for providing me with my newest G-rated insult
This might be an obvious point but it's not that cork material itself is carbon friendly, but having robust demand for cork ensures proliferation cork oaks that can sequester CO2.
Tonne is a mass measurement... How can 1 tonne store 73 tonnes of CO2?
The source of that fact is here [0], but that is counting the forest that makes the cork. However they aren't growing a new forest for new cork, so that 73 tonnes of stored carbon is static. Each cork harvest lowers that 73:1 ratio.
https://www.amorimcork.com/en/media-center/news/research-hig...
> Planting forests is a commonly used approach to offset carbon emissions by polluting industries, but when the trees are harvested they are usually cut down and much of their stored carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
> But cork oaks are one of the few commercial forests not felled for harvesting. This means the cork tree's carbon storage capacity keeps increasing during the 200 or more years the trees can live.
> Most of the carbon remains locked in the tree as it continues to grow. Although cork products contain some of the absorbed carbon, they can have a long life after being cut from the tree. Cork can be recycled and is slow to break down even when discarded.
(Note I am not attempting to state whether that claim is true or not, merely offering one potential explanation of how the trees might sequester 73 tonnes CO2 for every tonne of cork harvested)
There's about 2.5g of oxygen per 1g of carbon in carbon dioxide, and carbon takes the lion's share of hydrocarbons' mass, so I wouldn't be surprised if just the cork itself would burn to twice its weight in CO2. Then you consider the growth of the tree itself over time. Oak is about 3-4x the density of cork, so I wouldn't be surprised if you got a few grams of wood per gram of cork.
That 70x multiplier is enormous and probably overinflated, but these are just two factors I could think of in a couple of minutes, so I can easily see how a tree, over its lifetime, might sink 10-20 tonnes of carbon per 1 tonne of cork produced.
The Stelvin cap is both a blessing and a curse, bottles can be opened dead easily with just a quick twist of its screw cap which makes it highly convenient (especially so when one misplaces one's traditional cork screw as so often happens). It's also very handy for resealing bottles that have been only partially consumed.
For me, the Selvin cap is also somewhat of a curse because I no longer have access to a reliable source of used corks which I use for a multitude of diffetent jobs—of which one of the most important is capping sharp tools.
Before the Selvin screw cap was introduced some decades ago, the quality of corks used in bottling wine in this country started to fall below par and the reason was that the demand for wine suddenly shot up in the 1980s. The quality of wine corks was pretty terrible, they'd either crumble or break into pieces when one was extracting them, or they'd leak or not seal properly and the wine would either age prematurely or it'd go off (oxidize) whilst still in the bottle.
Effectively, both the cork shortage and the concomitant price hikes for corks set the scene for the mass takeover by the Selvin screw cap.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-top
The odds are not the worst, but the older (and more expensive) the bottle the worse they get.
The main push for plastic caps, is in markets who are not usual wine drinkers. And it is mostly driven by lower cost of plastic vs cork, and probably the marketing barrier that many people don't actual know/want how to use a cork screw.
You don’t need to buy century old vintage for that to be an issue. Just a few years will do the trick.
Which is why winemakers dislike cork: cork leads to product loss, it’s used for the cachet, and when possibly they use hybrid / layered corks with higher reliability.
Citation desperately needed! Cork allows for an air exchange which no other artificial material does.
I don't know a single Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese winemaker that even sells without cork. The only _exceptions_ to this are when they sell to retail supermarkets in northern Europe or US for whom they sometimes cap it with metal.
Air exchange is the one thing you least want, it means oxidation. The entire point of the cork is to keep air out. Air is the enemy.
> I don't know a single Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese winemaker that even sells without cork.
Again, because of the cachet of cork. Most buyers don’t even know what they’re drinking. Plastic and metal caps feel cheap, therefore buyers don’t want them.
Perhaps your taste is a little more expensive than what I see on supermarket shelves there, but a significant quantity of bottled wines don't use real cork stoppers.
However, commercial forests that are harvested every few decades (depending on species) and their wood locked up in various products like paper, furniture or buildings store co2 for the lifetime of the object. If the resulting object is at the end of its useful life put in a landfill (underground) that prevents decomposition, co2 is locked for a very long time.
Tldr. / Commercial forests are better for "the climate" that old growth. Dumping organic matter in deep landfills is better that composting for the same. Mind blown!
There are many more points to be brought up here, but I will leave at this for the sake of brevity =)
I'd be interested to get more info on this. Specifically, the two claims made by the parent seem plausible enough:
- that old growth forests are carbon neutral
- that growing and harvesting trees is carbon negative
Or is it a time scale issue?
- As you said, time scale: Forests and their ecosystem take a long time to form. Much longer time horizons that we are dealing with with climate change
- Strictly, yes, growing a tree and harvesting it and putting the harvested wood somewhere in a bunker removes carbon from the atmosphere. But in reality, the harvested wood is processed, and there's a lot of carbon emissions associated with that. Furthermore, it's not stored for thousands of years. It's e.g. used as paper, and then recycled or burned or whatever.
- A forest is not just trees. There's a whole ecosystem, including soil, fungi, animals, insects, different species of trees and plants. This has many benefits to the biodiversity and resilience of that region, that also counter-acts climate change. Tree plantations on the other hand, are just one type of tree, that often are not even native to the that region. Tree plantations destroy ecosystems, so even if the carbon negative argument would be valid (it's not), this would not be a good idea.
"This traditional type of management is not disruptive to biodiversity, which has adapted and endures because of it. The wild species that inhabit these areas no longer have alternatives, and so will be at risk if the Montado land-use is changed."
Alentejo as seen the influence of man in transforming the landscape for thousands of years. This type of management was likely very disruptive. biodiversity adapted and the one that didn't is gone. Most of the times we can't even see the problem simply because the bodies of the extinct species decomposed and left no trace. Wolves are gone, vultures are gone, wild boars are a problem due to the lack of natural predators and most land is fenced which is a huge problem to any kind of bigger wild life that needs to move around. From what I've learned cork trees were heavily trimmed during the fifties due to the need for wood making them a lot smaller than they could be and so storing a lot less carbon. So things are very disruptive but sometimes it's just not in a time scale we can notice, or feel and responsability for it.
"Material scientists in Amorim's iCork lab are also experimenting by combining cork with rubber and bio-based or biodegradable polymers to develop other new uses including injection moulding."
So it's an experiment in making composites of cork and plastic that will probably be impossible to recycle and will take a long take to degrade in realistic conditions. Not saying that those material aren't needed I just really think this wording is trying to deceive people into thinking this is something it's not.
I think you are right to be skeptical. Submarine is basically required reading on HN
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I'll counter your skepticism by saying you're just not skeptical enough.
We are the society that is banning straws while completely ignoring fishing nets. We are the society banning single-use bags, while selling you garbage bags and ignoring plastics in packaging.
We are not interested in actually solving any of these issues, just making small tweaks - as inefficient as possible - that allow us to feel good on social media.
It's quite easy to drink a drink without a straw - quick easy win.
Fishing without nets requires more thought and retooling. You do what you can do.
Similar single use shopping bags clear were a scourge - near me before the ban they used to festoon trees. Shopping bags can easily be reused. Reusing bin bags is much more difficult. Here in the UK plastic in packaging is a high-profile issue - particularly food packaging.