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Core77 Photo Gallery: How Cork is Made
Brooklyn-based designer and educator Daniel Michalik specializes in working with cork. Obsessed with finding new ways to shape the material, he spent a week traveling around Portugal to document how cork is made from the independent harvesting farms in Alentejo, to the factories of the countries largest cork manufacture Amorim where all the scrap material is used as biomass fuel to power the plants.
300,000 tons of cork is produced globally every year and 52.5% of this comes from Portugal. Harvesting a crop can only happen once every nine years. It's critical to peel the bark off carefully as damaging the new layer underneath will destroy the trees value, highly skilled workers use a special axe called the Machada and can strip a tree in about 10 minutes.
Checkout our gallery to see how wine bottle cork stoppers are made (representing about 60% of all cork based production), sheet material for flooring, and the molding of dark cork insulation blocks. And stay tuned for Daniels in depth look at cork manufacturing on the blog in the next few next weeks.
» View Gallery: How Cork is Made
For more from the Lifecycle of Cork series:
» Cork: Letting the Material Lead
» Men in Trees: A Look at the Annual Portugese Cork Harvest
» The Loops: The Industrial Lifecycle of Cork
Daniel Michalik pictured in his Bushwick studio demonstrating a technique he uses to create 3D forms from layers of sheet cork material. -
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Comments
I was lucky enough to had been born and raised in this region of Portugal...
My family actually has a small property were every nine years the "ritual" happens. But let me tell you this is a hard job.. not only its fully manual but it happens on the peak of the summer where temperatures can go up to almost 40C (over 100Fahrenheit).
Indeed these workers are very well paid and skilled.