What about the farmers you tring to protect?

The new question of the week is, “doesn’t recycling the cork here in North America take away cork sales from the farmers you’re trying to protect?” Simple answer: no. Long answer, the cork being collected and recycled by our organization and its partners is not being reused for wine corks as they have been compromised by having a cork screw in them, leaving a hole. The corks that we collect are being used in developing “green” industries here in North America and are not taking away sales from the Mediterranean cork industry. The major goal of our organization is raise awareness about the importance of saving these forests. By helping to inform people about the negative environmental aspects of synthetic closures and screw caps, we hope to reverse the trend of wineries moving to these alternative closures. The cork trees of Portugal are protected and cannot be cut down, but the rest of the Mediterranean cork forests are not. If the move towards alternative closures continues, the unprotected forests will disappear, leaving millions of forest potentially turned to desert. If ever there was evidence that the collection and recycling of the billions of corks, which would otherwise end up in our landfills, was causing financial hardship to the family farmers of the corks forests, we would shut the program down, without question. I hope that helps answer this question for everyone.