Global warming is one of Humanity’s greatest concerns, uniting nations, governments, businesses and citizens in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a key to climate change.

The wine industry is fully aware of the need to reduce its carbon footprint, placing a strong emphasis on the uniqueness of natural cork products and cork oak forests, which play an important role in fighting global warming.

Given that we play such an important role, the carbon footprint of corks should be taken into account. This means that not only the carbon retained by corks should be evaluated, but also the ability of cork oak forests to absorb carbon.

In addition, research conducted by consulting and auditing firms PricewaterhouseCoopers and EY, has validated the role of cork in containing greenhouse gases.

These studies, sponsored by Corticeira Amorim and carried out by these independent firms, were able to compare the life cycle of cork stoppers against plastic stoppers and screw caps composed of aluminum and plastic.

The results of this study, the only ones to date that have subjected different types of closures to a peer review, indicate that when we consider the ecosystem uptake made possible by the cork extraction cycle, the retention capacity reaches 309 grams of CO2 in the case of generic natural cork stoppers and up to 562 grams of CO2 in the case of stoppers for sparkling wines, in strong contrast with the CO2 emission attributed to each plastic stopper (up to 14.8 g/cap) and aluminum stoppers (up to 37.2 g/cap).

We are pleased to announce that, based on the parameters identified in these studies, our purchases of natural cork stoppers made between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2020, resulted in a significant contribution to CO2 sequestration (4.4 tons of CO2).