Everyone knows that it is used to build the stopper of the bottles of the most precious wine. Only few of us know it for its insulating skills and very few know that the cork is a natural material even used in the technological progress. Let’s see together the big capacities of the cork and why it meets the technology.
History of the cork
The protagonist of today is a veggy texture. It covers the stem and the roots of the woody plants where it replaces the skin of the tree that fails while growning and with the increase of the diameter of the main structure.
It is mined only in the period between the first of may and the end of august because this is the period of the year when it can be easily taken without damage the tree.
In the centuries it was chosen for many different uses: as insulation or for the production of caps for the high quality wine. It was and it is still today one of the most used material for the sole of the shoes, but not only. Since the ’60 it’s used even as a sound-absorbing material, for the music recording studios or in the airspace field as termal sheeld.
Cork: recyclable material
The cork is one of the most used natural materials even for its recyclability. Very often we forgot about it and we throw the cork caps away in the mixed waste bin. The cork though can be reused in many ways.
A simple and creative example is the one to keep the bottles caps to realize something where to put the pans. If we aren’t creative we can throw the caps and the residues of this material in some specific bins to separatelly dispose, as well as for paper and plastic.
The cork infact is completely biodegradable and correctly dispose it allows to reuse it to build other objects in cork as coating for windows, layers for the floor and so on.
When the nature meets the technology
We said that the cork meets the technology and that it helped in the technological progress. This is true because it is a material that today is used to create revolutionary objects for our daily life.
An example are the kitchenware that can be heated with the electricity, which external cover is made in cork. This allows to keep the heat of the food and let the food cooking going slower even after we “unplugged it”.
Another example are the mousepad. The carpets for the mouses for the computer job realized in cork double face. Infact, while one side has a cavity made with cork, the other side has a digital sensitivity cavity on which we can write as well as with a digital blackboard and transmit what we wrote.
Technologic caps
Beyond these examples, the cork is mostly used for the production of caps for bottles. Even they evolved over the time by keeping the main component the cork.
The wine industry is continuosly evolving and with it even the related industries. For this reason few years ago it was born a new kind of cork cap that allows to keep the wine “clean” without the micro sphere that contain TCA and TBA. We are talking about the moleculas responsible for the so called “cap flavour”. Odourless moleculas that often change the flavour of the wine and change the presence of the tannis needed to have a specific or another quality to identify a good wine.
So, thecnological caps that helps to keep unchanged the flavour of the wine. Lunchboxes where heat the food, Portable desks where to draw. With the cork we can do many things, many of them fully meet the technology.
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