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January 2018
WINE FROM NATURE
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A key credential of premium wine is its “from nature” claim. With that claim comes a broader responsibility to the environment as a whole. The use of ProCork products by wine producers provides the opportunity to demonstrate eco-friendly actions while still protecting the quality of the wine.
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In improving environmental practices, the wine industry focuses on vineyard and winery issues - water, pesticide, herbicide, chemical usage, runoff and waste water as well as the key area of packaging.
Cork is a product that has all the environmental benefits you could ask for. It is light weight, natural, recycled, a greenhouse gas sink and it protects wildlife. Wine sealed in cork demonstrated to the consumer your positive environmental actions. You can't get more organic than cork.
A complete life cycle study conducted in Germany by The Institute for Applied Ecology, Freiburg, where the environmental impact of natural wine cork and screwcap were compared, came out in favour of cork.
The study concluded: "Cork closures perform considerably better than aluminium screwcaps across the most environmentally-relevant criteria and key environmental problem areas (resource depletion, contribution to the greenhouse effect, and tendency to contribute to acidification)."
This study was backed up by an extensive PricewaterhouseCoopers/Ecobilan Life Cycle Analysis study in 2008 which found cork was the best performer in 6 of 7 environmental indicators including releasing 24 times less greenhouse gas than screwcap, 9 times less greenhouse gas than plastic cork and using 4 times less non-renewable energy than screwcap and plastic cork.
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All you have to do is look at cork and you can see its natural.
References:
Life Cycle Assessment – Natural Cork v Aluminium Screwcap, The Institute for Applied Ecology, Freiburg Germany, 1996
Evaluation of the environmental impacts of Cork Stoppers versus Aluminium and Plastic Closures PricewaterhouseCoopers/Ecobilan, 2008, https://www.procorktech.com/environment or https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d47cc4_30037f6672d34d1dadc4dab1e59ded09.pdf
AN IMPORTANT REMINDER
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Please place your orders early this year. The harvest happens only once a year and we source our quality bark at that time. The quality of the raw bark we have been obtaining has been improving year on year due to better forest practices.
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Contact: Dr Gregor Christie
Ave Santiago 84
Rio Meao Portugal www.procorktech.com info@procorktech.com