Does anyone else remember there being stories in past about increased cork production being unsustainable as in not enough availability and quality was getting lower? Or am I remembering wrong.
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.
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.
Hopefully this isn’t some kind of Mandela effect. I don’t think it is.
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.