Cork recycling
As Korkrecycling the recycling of waste is cork designated for the production of new goods. Separately collected bottle corks and untreated remnants of cork parquet, such as those that arise when laying new cork floors, come into question. The collected goods are sorted and crushed into granules , which are used as bulk material for thermal insulation in house construction or added to other building materials.
requirements
The key requirement for well-functioning recycling is that they are kept separate from the start. Pure, clean and thus usable cork cannot be subsequently sorted out from a mixed collection of recyclable materials or from garbage. The greatest possible purity of the cork collection is a prerequisite for the usability of the old cork material. No plastic or metal parts (such as wires, caps and foils from champagne bottles) may get into the cork collection. Press corks, press cork coasters, pin boards and the like can be used - but no pieces of wood or glue residue may adhere. The same principle applies to cuttings from cork insulation boards and untreated cork floors: recycling is only possible without adhesion of adhesives and without mixing with foreign substances (i.e. without bitumen, gypsum, cement, nails and so on). The press corks contain binding agents , but these binding agents are approved as food-safe and are unproblematic in the thermal insulation material. Old cork must be collected separately from the start. Plastic bottle stoppers should not be collected. Real corks do not belong in the yellow sack or the recycling bin - not even in the organic bin , as cork is difficult to break down.
Cork collection
It is important to network the local cork collection points in municipalities, districts or city districts. In addition to official collection points (recycling centers, recycling centers), there are also collection points in some shops (Handelshof / Kaufland, wine shops, beverage markets) or collection points run by associations (e.g. environmental and nature conservation centers), parishes or in schools, kindergartens, natural food stores and so on . The waste management offices of the cities and districts usually ensure the networking of the collection points. You have the groupage collected at regular intervals and brought for recycling .
The most suitable collection and transport containers are air-permeable, coarsely woven, tear-resistant plastic fabric bags. The corks should be stored dry and airy so that the wine smell is lost.
Cork recycling products
Thermal insulation made from old cork helps protect the environment in several ways. As an insulating granulate, recycled cork has been structurally tested. Corresponding structural suitability tests and investigations have confirmed the positive practical experience. With grain sizes of 4 to 12 mm, a density of around 120 kg / m³, a thermal conductivity of 0.046 W / (m · K) and fire protection class B2 according to DIN 4102, the product has good building physics values.
Since recycled cork insulation granulate is produced exclusively by non-profit organizations in Germany, availability is not always given. For this reason, natural cork grist, which is a waste product in the manufacture of cork parquet, is often used to meet the demand. In addition to the industrial production of seals, cork powder and cork granules are also used in conjunction with clay as building materials and aggregates.
Bulk insulation
For the insulation with recycled cork granulate, paneled insulation cavities are produced, which are sealed off wind-tight with the help of water-vapor-diffusible cardboard. When building the roof, we recommend external formwork or the use of fibreboard as an external end to the insulation. The insulation fill is carried out with the interior work or renovations, preferably between rafters , in beamed ceilings and partition walls. At the upper end of the cladding, the insulation granulate from paper bags is poured or blown into the insulating cavities in sections. Compaction is not necessary because the recycled cork granulate tends to increase in grain volume even after processing due to relaxation expansion. If the cork granulate is not mixed with other substances, it remains recyclable and can be recovered again in the event of renovation or dismantling, since dry cork practically does not rot.
history
The first public request to collect bottle corks for recycling was made in 1987 by the Recycling Working Group in the Association for Environmental Protection (BfU) in Tübingen . As a citizens' initiative , the organization of the waste paper street collections and the establishment of two waste aluminum collection points created a technically experienced group that was able to initiate appropriate public relations work as well as networked and independent logistics .
A concrete starting point for the considerations was the finding that in almost every household the bottle corks that are produced are first collected - in drawers, cans or cardboard boxes. Even in everyday behavior, corks are obviously too good to throw away.
For a pilot phase, a collection point was set up in a Tübingen shop in the summer of 1987 and the thermal insulation of a building roof was planned as a recycling project. In the pedestrian underpass to the Tübingen main train station , a showcase was filled two-thirds with collected old corks and the address of the Tübingen collection point was posted next to an encouraging comment to participate. Within a few weeks, around 5 cubic meters of bottle corks from half of Baden-Württemberg were collected - including by parcel post .
When the pilot project was completed - the roof was insulated between the rafters with a mixture of bottle corks and purchased cork granules - the cork collection was already a sure-fire success. Various shredding processes were tested for further processing and partners were sought. After a research trip to the cork experimental station in Tempio Pausania on Sardinia, Thilo Schäfer from Tübingen gave a lecture on June 29, 1989 at the Volkshochschule Offenburg on the topic: "Preserving holiday landscapes on the Mediterranean - collecting corks." In a subsequent conversation he met Klaus Freudenberger, the public relations officer at the Epilepsy Center in Kehl-Kork. During this conversation the idea arose to collect bottle corks under the ambiguous slogan 'cork for cork' and to process them in the local workshop.
Finally, the plucking, tearing and shearing mill in the workshop for the disabled at the epilepsy center in Kehl-Kork (the suburb of Kehl am Rhein was already called that before) was suitable for crushing used bottle corks. The granules produced were packaged as thermal insulation material and marketed under the registered brand name 'RecyKORK' since 1992. At the same time, a collection point network was initiated regionally in southern Baden and, together with the Tübingen collection point, quickly expanded to the entire federal state. Committed private households, shops, landlords, wine shops, winegrowers' cooperatives and waste management associations were informed and networked. At the same time as the nationwide introduction of separate waste collection , press and public relations work for cork recycling reached a broad and committed audience in the first half of the 1990s. In 1997, the Nord-Film production group in Basel made a documentary entitled "Cork" for Hessian school television, which was broadcast in 1999 by NDR and in 2000 by Arte .
Under the motto 'cork for cork', bottle corks are now being collected in many places - even beyond the borders of the Federal Republic - and mostly brought to the workshop for the handicapped as additional freight by an international forwarding company based in Kehl. With this project it could be shown that with the ecological aspects of waste avoidance and waste reduction as well as with climate protection (CO 2 reduction through thermal insulation) the social aspects of maintaining jobs for disabled people can be advantageously combined. Cork recycling has also proven to be suitable for creating jobs or for professional qualification in other projects . The cork recycling in cork was stopped on July 1, 2014 due to the declining collection volume. The collected corks are now processed by a cooperation partner, the proceeds go to Diakonie Kork.
Since centralized recycling in the initial phase could not be assumed, decentralized cork collection and recycling projects had already been initiated in Tübingen in the 1980s. Church institutions, associations and self-help groups for the unemployed have adopted the idea for employment projects in all parts of Germany. The attempt to set up a nationwide cork recycling cooperation at the end of the 1990s was unsuccessful. Most of the projects were heavily dependent on subsidies, which is why only a few cork recycling facilities were able to continue to exist despite the cancellation of public funding. The fact that the manufacturing companies in the cork countries of origin also support cork collection and even operate cork recycling in cooperation with local nature and environmental protection associations shows, however, that even under the conditions of globalization, a concept with lasting persuasive power also produces economic sustainability.
Today around 1.2 billion bottle corks are produced in Germany every year, which corresponds to a volume of 32,000 m³ of cork grist. Of these, around 140 million corks are now being recycled.
Cork recycling in other countries
Australia
In 1989, the price of imported Portuguese granulated cork in Australia more than doubled within 18 months. This brought the company ACL Comcork, which manufactured seals from cork for the automotive industry, into economic problems. The wife of the general manager had the vision that collecting and recycling the bottle corks produced in Australia would reduce the need for the now expensive raw material and that ultimately the country would be less dependent on cork imports. Since she herself was a member of Girl Guides Australia (a girl scout organization), a nationwide collection network was quickly established. Today the guides, with the support of private individuals, hotels, restaurants and even large companies such as The Body Shop , Qantas , Woolworth or IKEA , collect around 200 tons of corks per year, which are recycled at ACL Comcork.
Switzerland
In 1993 a senior citizens' organization founded the 'Swiss Cork Recycling' and since then a collection network has been set up in cooperation with other organizations. In Switzerland, corks are mainly collected in catering establishments, in many places also in public collection points. In the collection center of the 'Golden Age Club' in Zurich, the groupage is re-sorted and then given for recycling.
France
In France, the Tire-Bouchon (corkscrew) campaign, now renamed Recycliège , was launched by a regional chairman of an organization for the disabled. It represents a network between collecting organizations and cork processing recycling companies. The collecting organizations take over decentralized storage until a complete truck load is reached. The customers, three cork processing companies in the Gascognischen cork oak growing area , undertake to assume the transport costs and to purchase the corks at a fixed price. The proceeds go to the collecting organizations, which in turn have to provide 75% of it for humanitarian projects. Thanks to active support in the charitable environment, the campaign quickly gained nationwide importance. In 2011 90 t of bottle corks were collected in this way.
Individual evidence
- ↑ NaturBauHof center for environmentally friendly building: Recy-Cork - insulating material granulate .
- ↑ Diakonie Kork: "Cork for Cork" changes processing , July 1, 2014.
- ↑ Naturschutzbund Deutschland eV: Cork: a strong substance ( Memento of the original from 23 August 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ↑ Diakonie Kork: Cork for cork creates jobs and contacts ( Memento of the original from August 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ↑ a b WWF France, Jean-Philippe Orts and Daniel Vallauri: La seconde vie d'un bouchon de liège - Panorama mondial des initiatives de collecte et recyclage ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically defective marked. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , June 2006 (French)
- ↑ Swiss cork recycling website
- ↑ RECYCLIEGE FRANCE (French)
literature
- Thilo Schäfer: Corks for cork - an eco-building material from a successful recycling campaign . In: Environment communal. Information service for environmental practice . No. 240/29. August 1995, Umweltarchiv I-II, Raabe-Verlag, Stuttgart 1995.
- Hessian Ministry for the Environment, Agriculture and Forests and the Ecological School Working Group: Cork. The fabulous bark. Information, teaching materials, ideas, media notices. Cork oak - cork - cork products - collection of old cork - cork recycling - recycling products . Hessian Ministry for the Environment, Agriculture and Forests (Public Relations Department), Wiesbaden 1999, 36 pages, ISBN 3-89274-177-8