ReCork Australia - Sustainability Nomination

Re-Cork is Australia's first and only complete product stewardship program for cork.  Australian wine consumers remove approximately 120 million corks from wine bottles each year.  To date, the majority of these corks have found their way into landfill or household mulching.  Re-Cork aims to capture the negative carbon footprint of these discarded corks and extend their life into new, value added products.  Thanks to an agreement with Australia's largest wine retailer, Endeavour Drinks Group, consumers can bring their used wine corks into their local retail store and place them in a designated cork recycling unit.   These corks are then transported to a granulating facility where they are sorted to remove contaminants, and reduced to small granules.   These granules, and even the dust, are then formed into several products which can be sold back to the wine sector and other sectors such as sports, fashion and construction.

With the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation’s (APCO) looming 2025 sustainable packaging targets, the wine industry needed a solution to the end of life for cork.  Amorim Cork, in partnership with Endeavour Drinks and recycling experts, Save our Soles, have created the solution to this industry need.   The National program was made possible by generous financial support from the SA Government through Green Industries SA and Treasury Wine Estates.  The fashion manufacturer RM Williams also played a vital role in working with our group to develop an Australian sourced replacement for their imported cork shoe filler.

Re-Cork brings together leaders from our industry in a united effort to solve a problem.  Collaboration between all the parties have seamlessly created a recycling model which can now be rolled out across all retailers and all wineries with the confidence that every cork collected will be given a second life.   The success in securing the end of life demand for the cork granulate has surpassed initial expectations, and now the demand far exceeds the program’s capacity to supply

Cork’s inherent sustainability advantages as a packaging material, together with Re-Cork, have further solidified the future of cork in Australia as the best environmental choice to seal wine bottles.