Screw the Environment: Do Screw Caps Harm The Planet?

Posted 04/23/2008 at 07:30 AM by Derek

You order an expensive bottle of wine and when it arrives instead of pulling out his corkscrew and getting down to business the server twists the cap making a sound akin to opening a bottle of ice tea bought from a convenience store.

You stare in outrage, taken aback that your bottle is capped in a steel seal. But your indignation isn’t due to the perception of screw caps as cheap. No, as a wine consumer you’re well aware of the benefits of the Stelvin (screw cap) enclosure. It’s the negative effects on the environment that gain your ire, including the potential for species loss, mass fires and “desertification.”

The truth is that cork is something as wine drinkers we don't think about until it troubles us. When the waiter hands you a cork for inspection most of us toss it aside and go for the juice worry-free. Maybe we should worry. Portuguese company Amorim, the world’s largest cork producer, claims that natural cork is the only wine enclosure that is truly sustainable and there just might be something to that claim.

Cork trees grow in the Mediterranean in Portugal, Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Italy, Tunisia and France, on over two million hectares of land. Portugal produces the majority of the world's cork at 54 percent. The bark from cork trees is stripped to produce cork products but the trees themselves are not cut down. Therefore, cork is both renewable and biodegradable.

Cork as a wine stopper is the primary use of the bark. According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), alternate enclosures such as Stelvin are leading to reduction in cork sales. The WWF believes that with current trends—predicting a worst-case scenario—by 2015 ninety-five percent of all bottles will be closed with synthetic enclosures.

This may be a bit distorted. It's likely that while cork producers are losing a percentage of the market they are not actually losing dollars since that market has broadened. Nevertheless, the WWF has been raising awareness about the impact of alternate enclosures on cork and the environment since 2006 in their campaign, “Cork Screwed?”

Some of their key findings are, as reported in their downloadable brochure:

• The increasing use of alternative wine stoppers may reduce the market value of cork, and thus the incentive to preserve and manage cork oak landscapes.

• The recent increases in global wine production and markets for cheaper wines which are consumed soon after bottling, have encouraged the accelerated use of synthetic stoppers and screwtops.

• If the synthetic market share increases to 95%, cork production will decrease to 19,500 tons by 2015, compared to 300,000 tons currently. Such a reduction in cork harvesting would place three quarters of the cork oak surface area at risk from conversion, abandonment and fires, by 2015.  

• If these threats are not addressed, by 2015, the Western Mediterranean could lose up to 2 million ha of cork oak forests, as well as key threatened species such as the Barbary deer, due to fire, conversion, degradation and desertification.

Despite the alarm, it's not exactly doomsday for cork producers yet. Not only has the market broadened but the public is reticent to fully embrace alternate enclosures when it comes to fine wine. It is, however, worth taking note. It seems that what at first appears to be a simple modernization of a very ancient technology may have unintended consequences for the Earth.

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