Cork - The Other Oak

If you haven't been living under a rock, I'm sure you've been told by now that cork is "a renewable resource," and seen it used in everything from hardwood floor to, well, cork boards.

This week, Whole Foods did a blog entry about cork for a new cork recycling program they're running in the stores. While the recycling program didn't excite me too much (I drink inexpensive wine, which rarely has real corks anymore to recycle), I was rather intrigued by many of the "cork facts" in the article. For example, did you know that cork comes from an oak tree? Did you know that the trees aren't cut-down to harvest it? And, did you know that trees that have been harvested of their cork absorb five times the CO2 as other trees? That makes cork the "super wood" of the tree world, IMHO.

Check out the full article from Whole Foods' Blog, The Whole Story.


Image of a cork tree borrowed from "traed mawr" at Flickr under the Creative Commons attribution license.