Everything you've ever wanted to know about the cork, but you never dared to ask

From space travel to our cars engines, from airport tracks to champagne,from sport to allergy prevention. A material that has been used for thousands years. What are we talking about? Ladies and gentlemen, your majesty THE CORK!

CORK is a material obtained from the outer layer of the cork oak bark, also called cork tree.

A bit of history:

Some scholars date the origin of the cork oak about 60 million years ago, to the tertiary era, exactly to the Oligocene, concomitantly with the creation of the great Mediterranean basin. The term cork comes from the Latin suber, very similar to the Greek syphar, which means wrinkled skin.

The cork was a very present material in the life of the Mediterranean populations: Greeks, Romans and even the Egyptians, used it to isolate roofs and walls of domus, the beverages capping , food, ointments and perfumes and also as a serving tray dishes.

Versatility and infinite uses

As we have already said, the cork is obtained from the bark of oaks, a bark that is not like all the others: it is lightweight, fireproof and elastic.

These characteristics are maintained even at high temperatures, the cork is ideal in fact to make gaskets of engines, to be an essential component of some spacecraft heat shield. Even the airport runways are built by inserting cork layers in order to avoid their freezing. Fantastic! Isn’t it?

The cork is obviously excellent as insulator and soundproofer for home. Its properties allows to furnish and protect in a natural way ours homes with superior performance then any other existing material.

Design and fashion, through the use of fabrics made from cork, increasingly use it to create clothes, shoes, bags and original accessories of great value.

Even for  sport cork has great value because it’s used in the core of baseballs and for the handles of fishing rods.

Last but not least, the most famous of all its uses: the production of corks with which bottles of wine and champagne are sealed.

Economics in harmony with nature at 100%

Industry of cork  demonstrates that humans can work in harmony with nature by using their gifts without depriving them of their wealth, increasing the capacity of nature itself to protect endangered landscapes and animals.

Many endangered species, such as the Imperial Eagle, the monk vulture and the Black Vulture, nest on these trees. In some cases the survival of a species is closely depends on cork industry. This is the case of Iberian Lynx whose survival, according to WWF, is closely linked to the prosperity of the cork industry in Spain and Portugal

We conclude saying that we hope to have given you some notions about this material that is often associated only with the caps of the bottles, with the expectation that the next time that you will have cork in your hands, you will think about a cork oak tree that, we reaffirm, produces a biodegradable and renewable natural material, and helps environmental protection.

In the next post, we will deepen what are the properties of cork and how to use better this material in everyday life.

Greetings from the team of Biosughero.it and remember ... you too, the natural choice.