Green Logistics: Wine Cork Recycling

ReCork America announced a partnership with Whole Foods Market to recycle wine corks.  Image via Wikipedia

The six month trial will involve twenty-five Northern California  Whole Foods Market stores.  Customer will have to bring their corks to the stores for recycling. Recycled cork, unlike plastic or screw top enclosures, can be turned into flooring tile, building insulation, shoe soles among many other products.  Nike, an example of another green re cycler, allows you to return your old sneakers to be made in to road paving materials.

Although wine cork reuse is not a huge issue in the recycling world, the solution represents another example of the many start up businesses that will emerge around the green logistics space.  Over 13 billion corks are sold each year across the globe and you can bet that most end up in land fills.  Unfortunately, the number of corks collected by Whole Foods will be minimal.  What really needs to be done is that the distributors need to collect wine corks from retailer, bars and restaurants as well as the bottles (as they do for wine bottles in Maine) and recycle them.  Don't hold your breath waiting for this to happen....

There have been a number of other interesting start up companies emerging in the green logistics space.  My guess is that we will see a lot more point or micro recycling solutions appear in the next few years.

Comments

[Kevin Davis]

Whether it's a viable business model or not, the American consumer is demanding to become more socially conscious and often when given the opportunity with minimal to no cost, will take the extra effort to be socially responsible.

The corks are just one of many great trends that are starting to take place, from the diminishment of plastic bags to "green bags" for groceries, to the recent strategy of selling carbon offsets to airplane passengers in San Francisco.

Kevin G. Davis
Managing Director, Emerald Endeavors

[dla911]

We can also start by not designing "trash" into our products. Having just finished a Christams gathering with 7 grandchildren, I was appalled by the amount of packaging I had to recycle after they left.

[Computer Recycling]

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