Now, I’m not what anybody would call a tree-hugger or anything like that, but I do support recycling. When it comes to the plethora of corks in our house, my wife recycles most of them into craft projects (which can be found and purchased at her Etsy store found here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/thegoodwineartist). If, however, you are not as…craft inclined as my wife, but you still want to recycle after you’ve enjoyed a bottle of wine you can of course place the glass in a recycling bin, but you may not know that the corks can be recycled as well.
Right now the California Wine Club has a program to recycle corks, and you can even get benefits from sending them your corks, including discounts on wine club memberships and footwear from SOLES. The best part is that if the Cork Drive can get 20 million corks by the end of September, they’re going to plant 1000 cork trees in the Mediterranean cork forests to celebrate.
To send in your corks just call 1-800-777-4443 or send an email to corkdrive@cawineclub.com and they’ll send you an envelope. Just be sure to tell them how many corks you have so that they can send you a big enough envelope. It’s that easy.
To learn more, including the importance of cork trees, you can visit the Cork Drive website at http://www.cawineclub.com/cork-drive . Thanks to everybody that sends in corks and if you do, leave a comment and say how many you sent in, I’m curious to see how many can get sent in.
I’m all for recycling, but I question the benefit of this program on a number of fronts. First, the corks collected from California Wine Club members will be shipped to Asia to be made into shoes and then shipped back to Canada. Thats a long way to recycle corks and the carbon footprint of that is not environmentally sound. Second, why are we supporting a Canadian company taking jobs away from Americans, especially in this economy. Call me a sceptic, but this promotion reeks of greenwashing.