Cork is displacing plastics and creating a billion-dollar industry
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The harvest is tough work but it's the only well-paid trade left in agriculture. I doubt it has much future beyond fodder for high peasant magazine articles. Trees are dying left and right from multiple climate-related problems no one has a handle on. Divestment from the traditional montado like mine into intensive production units with better water management and automated extraction is the likely future. The billion-dollar outfits have started experiments with high-density groves, inspired by the olive oil industry's success. It's a finicky tree though, so conclusive results are taking a few decades more than you'd expect to materialise. They're stuck having to buy cork from thousands of traditionalist family farms for now.
But that's assuming the industry even grows enough to justify the investment into better plantations. Legitimate uses for the stuff apart from wine corks are scarce. We're all hoping that our phenomenal ecological footprint will see us grow as an industry into everything from insulation and roofing to shopping bags and umbrellas (hence said puff piece I imagine). We'll see, it really is a phenomenal material and the carbon math makes sense at the source. You can almost see the tree sucking out stuff from the air and soil to build thicker layers of bark. I joke that we've been doing regenerative farming for generations, we just didn't know it until someone told us.
If anyone on HN is ever in Portugal and wants to visit a montado, happy to take y'all on the most boring tour of your life. But we can have a nice picnic! It's lovely country.
What about cork flooring?
The newer multi-layer flooring is indistinguishable from plastic flooring. No point to it.
(Worst stuff being any mid-twentieth-century alternative containing literal asbestos)
I know another founder based in Lisbon so look out, if I'm ever there!
Indeed it is a lovely country!
I just watched this to try and get a better idea. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YnnbuoeQFSI
Would it be correct to say the cork is a protective layer over the part of the tree that does that nutrient transport, and most trees don’t allow for this kind of separation? Or maybe the average person just isn’t knowledgeable and skilled enough to make the distinction when removing bark?
On a side note, I’m happy to see cork is harvested sustainably and Portugal has such long standing laws in place to protect it. Many years ago I heard wines were moving away from cork because the world was going to run out, and it seemed like plastic and synthetic cork was becoming more popular in cheaper wine. Lately I’ve been seeing cork more often, so either we were lied to years ago, or something changed. Either way, I’m happy to see the change. I’ve always thought cork was a pretty cool material.
It's also worth it to say that young trees need to be de-corked once (when they're around 20 years old) before they'll produce useable cork. It grows much smoother after this first peel, which looks a lot more like normal bark (just much thicker).
The world is swinging back to natural materials, for better or worse. I'm biased of course but in this case I'm a fan purely because the physical properties are so good and there's so much space to make it more economical to consumers.
I had a bottle of wine a few months ago with a really bad cork. It did seem more like bark. I guess I can assume that came from a younger tree, borderline too young maybe.
But there are risks: https://apsjournals.apsnet.org/doi/10.1094/PDIS-03-16-0408-F...
Another interesting option in this realm is mycelium, which could be better scaled on an industrial level.
I, for one, welcome our industrial biological process overlords.
Especially in the cases where it supplants the more traditional kind that often involves lots of animal cruelty. I have no intrinsic objection to eating steak from a disembodied vat-muscle.
We produce 380M tons of plastic per year. IIUC, that's about the size of the entire lumber industry - of which cork is a very small insignificant percentage.
Cork has a very small part of the planet where it grows well, and basically everything else valuable grows well there, too...
The Nanocrystalline Cellulose market will be bigger than cork by 2030 probably - and even that is 25 years away from making a real dent in plastic consumption (aggressively).
It's orders of magnitude away from even taking out 1%.
Any material looking to fulfill that demand will start from that position; why would anyone be producing the material if they didn't already have that market? Every new thing starts from zero; plastics were at zero too, at one time.
It's not a new market.
If you don't drink a lot of wine in one sitting and have bottles that have been opened, corks seem to average out to being better for re-sealing the bottle -- specifically if you're placing them horizontally, like in a wine cooler. I've found screw caps frequently tend to leak, even over a single evening. Even with the hole from the corkscrew, the cork tends to reseal better from my experience.
With that said, I am talking about actual cork and not the plastic versions; Those will seep just as bad as screw caps.
If I was storing opened bottles for longer than a day or two, I'd probably make heavier use of the vacuum stoppers, but I'm in that midpoint of the spectrum where I neither need the fancy tools, but still need something more than the cheap solution.
Vinophiles are now considered 'hipsters'? Is there any less hipster crowd than uber-wealthy wine collectors, a hobby dating back generations, if not centuries?
For example if one cannot be bothered to use, or does not have a corkscrew handy, a screw cap might be preferred for some.
I know it is difficult for most Modern Americans to use a corkscrew. Even more difficult is being able to appreciate the complexities and effort that goes into making good, traditional wine. Best to do away with tradition for the sake of convenience.
PFAS are a specific family of chemicals unsuitable for this application.
No significant amount of microplastics is likely to develop from the mild abrasion of opening and closing a wine bottle a handful of times. And if your risk tolerance is so low that you are worried about that largely theoretical concern, you probably should not be drinking wine at all (because we have quite concrete evidence that alcohol is unhealthy -- unlike microplastics).
I would be (much) more worried about chunks of plastic getting in my wine from those fake cork products than from screw tops.
I think research has shown that simply storing acidic foods in contact with plastic causes micro plastics to release: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37343248/
This isn't a huge deal, because a separate tool made specifically for resealing wine bottles is better than either. But if you don't drink a whole bottle of wine at once, and you don't have such a tool, cork reseals better.
I remember the time when the press cried "there is no cork left on earth!!".
I remember the time when cheap wine came with plastic corks.
I remember the time when cheap wine had cork corks again.
(Honestly, HFCS prob has wreaked legit havoc via the "death by 1000 papercuts" method.)
If it's users with similar upvote/downvote patterns as you = higher weight, then it's more effective.
Over four decades, environmentalists have simply won the discussion. 99% of paper products made in the US are made using farmed wood. Now paper is renewable enough that I don't worry about putting it in the trash (since I know we have an incinerator).
Still uses petrochemicals for harvesting and processing, there's definitely a risk that certain kinds of tree farms are counterproductive. I don't think that's ever really broadly been the case though, it sounds like a whitepaper released by a thinktank funded by a plastic company to me. Those often get repackaged into low effort local news, it's not surprising that people get so confused.
Straws I guess get wrapped up in that, though I'd sooner just not use a straw and don't see why that's not the default. Seems strange to me that adult humans want a goofy plastic tube in order to make drinking liquid enjoyable enough.
To me the bigger issues are single use plastic cups and bottles, to which I say elimination and alternatives like water bottles and aluminum cans, paper cups, aluminum cups (did you know you can buy aluminum solo cups?), and glassware can really meet almost every need. It's a matter of volume and pollution versus real net utility versus the technology they replace.
There's some advanced plastics and things for packaging that are cool, but they don't need to be on every single thing.
Hopefully this isn’t some kind of Mandela effect. I don’t think it is.
>“Compared with materials like polyurethane foam [used for thermal insulation], products made with cork require less energy and produce less CO2 emissions.”
Polyurethane foam is used for thermal insulation in a few places. But fiberglass is still the champion of that sector, and it's older than plastic and more durable and abundant than cork. More often, polyurethane is used for couch cushions, cheap mattresses, and shoes, which are difficult use-cases for cork — Birkenstocks have a cult following but poor water resistance.
>used to shield fuel tanks on NASA spacecraft and electric car batteries.
And this about wraps it up.
There are probably some good use cases for cork, but the major advantage of plastic is the ability to do so much with so little. An LDPE bag of the sort now banned in California weighs about six grams. I can't think of many things you could do with six grams of cork that don't involve grapes.
For example, Washington State's energy code now requires continuous exterior insulation. Putting a continuous layer of rigid insulation on the outside of the building reduces heat loss due to thermal bridging (conduction through the studs).
The most common material for this purpose, in the US anyway, is foam (polystyrene or polyisocyanurate). Other options are mineral wool, fiberboard, and cork. Mineral wool and fiberboard are pretty expensive compared to foam and I imagine that cork would be similar or even more expensive. But a cool thing about cork is that it can double as both insulation and cladding. I don't know if that makes it an economical choice, but someone's marketing cork for this purpose right here in Washington [1].
[1] https://www.smallplanetsupply.com/thermacork
Edit: fixed a typo
[1] https://www.corkstore24.co.uk/shop/11-thermal-and-sound-insu... is the sort of thing I guess he was talking about
[2] https://ukgbc.org/resources/mycelium-insulation/ website seems to lean into the idea that this is basically mushrooms which seems a bit weird but whatever
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/global-p...
Gotta start somewhere I guess.
What else have you been missing out on in life due to undue judgement?
I talk about shoes, you talk about your attitude.
Cork has a little overlap with a few plastic use-cases, but only slightly. It requires far more effort to produce than a plastic equivalent, and is simply not suited to most use cases.
I do look forward to some cork alternatives to plastic where it makes sense. But I hardly expect it to make any meaningful difference to overall plastic use.
Plastics are ESSENTIAL for everything from medical devices, electrical insulation, to pipes. There are simply no alternatives. We are not going to replace PE or PVC jacketing for wires with cork.
Of course, cork isn’t the solution to all plastic use cases, just a potential replacement in some use cases. Like phasing out combustion vehicles, you have to signal that you’re forcing the sunset of the material so alternatives are identified and supply chains can reconfigure accordingly.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2023/12/1...
In the case of asbestos the harm was much greater and the substitutes much better and more readily available and the use range of the original material was much narrower.
The blind, ignorant hate for "plastics" online just goes to show how people can be led to believe anything.
For example polyethylene, used in milk jugs and water pipes is absolutely harmless. You could swallow a fist full of PE pellets per day and they would simply pass right through you unchanged. This is a scientific fact. If a PE container can hold concentrated sulfuric acid your stomach is going to do nothing to it. Yet for some reason drinking out of a plastic milk jug is bad because some random person online said so.
We did it for leaded gasoline.
What about hemp?
It is really bizarre to me how people online have jumped in the plastic hate bandwagon with zero understanding of how industrial processes that make the modern world possible actually work.
Why not replace the dirty rubber in tires with wooden wheels?
Just one tip:
It’s not the worst thing to assume good faith when somebody asks a follow up question. Especially here.
You might even assume that the person asking might not know your pet peeve trigger subject too well.
There’s even a chance they were genuinely curious to understand your point of view — until, through a rude rant-reply, they realised they were speaking to a tormented Twitter chatbot and dropped the subject instead.
And yet: Funkopops.
And yet: the biggest source of plastic pollution on the planet is apparently the Coca Cola corporation.
Yeah, keep plastic for where it's essential, but banning or regulating plastic use is essential to the our, and the biosphere's, long term survival.
Vinyl flooring exists because linoleum was superseded but it stands as an example of a niche where cork did function. I know why people wanted to stop using linoleum, it doesn't mean it doesn't "work"
? I'd like a clear and obvious reference.
"There is plastic in the environment"
It does not say "plastic harms this or that".
The equality "plastic presence"=="plastic harm" is not obvious to me
To me it is just like "man-made electromagnetic waves are everywhere, they are not natural, ergo this harms the environment"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_pollution#Effects
It's fairly well sourced. Some examples of harm from plastics, mostly on the environment:
> Degradation (changes in the ecosystem state) and modifications of marine systems are associated with loss of ecosystem services and values.
> in 2019, production and incineration of plastic will contribute greenhouse gases in the equivalent of 850 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere
> For example, in Bangkok flood risk increases substantially because of plastic waste clogging the already overburdened sewer system.
> Marine wildlife such as seabirds, whales, fish and turtles mistake plastic waste for prey; most then die of starvation as their stomachs become filled with plastic. They also suffer from lacerations, infections, reduced ability to swim, and internal injuries.
> When analyzing the effect of polyethylene microbeads (origin: cosmetic exfoliants) on the aquatic macrophyte L. minor, no effect on photosynthetic pigments & productivity was found, but root growth and root cell viability decreased.
But this one's about humans:
> By affecting the thyroid hormone axis, BPA exposure can lead to hypothyroidism.
What would it take to "unfold" something like a tree into a continously harvest able square with leaves and hydroponic roots still attached?
Also, it sounds like the CO2 extraction is increased in order to regrow the bark.