If you haven’t had a chance to visit, be sure to check out their great new location at 1622 Commercial Drive. Their beautiful new millwork holds a great selection of unique wines. And, in step with reducing their environmental footprint through measures like their energy efficient LED lighting, they are now also collecting your used corks for our program. Check it out and ask them about the benefits of getting a customer number while you’re at it.

Cheers!

Great stuff. Enjoy!

Note: This video was produced before we had test results back from the laser cutting contractor, which as you’ll see in our June 20 post, were unsuccessful. So, we’re still in search of the best method of cutting the corks into tile-sized discs. If you have a solution, we’d love to hear from you!

Rumour has it that folks in the Okanagan have an amazing appetite for good, better and best wines, so we’re anticipating a large volume of recycled wine corks. For all of you wine aficionados doing your part to uncork those fine vintages and keep those corks out of the waste stream, we salute you!

See our Okanagan Locations map for details. Cheers!

It’s heart-warming to know that, while I’m stock-piling drums of old wine corks and trying to solve technical challenges of remanufacturing them in Vancouver rather than trucking them to Ontario, others think this may be a worthwhile initiative.

I think it is, but sometimes you wonder if you’re more than a little bit crazy for pursuing these schemes! Anyways, thanks for your endorsement and encouragement Georgia Straight. Cheers!

These natural cork discs are applied to a mesh backing sheet similar to ceramic tiles that are supplied by the square foot. The sheet of cork discs is bonded with tile adhesive and grouted, just as you would any tile floor or counter back splash surface.

Great looking and durable. Check it out.

We have sourced a Vancouver, BC tile manufacturer that has the capacity to assemble sheets of cork tiles similar to the test sample you see here.

These prototype discs were manually cut with a sharp kitchen knife and glued to drywall patching mesh with a hot glue gun. They were sanded with an orbital sander and sealed with 2 coats of urethane.

They were cut to the same thickness as the white production run ceramic tiles you see in the background. Coincidentally, they are also nearly the same diameter and spacing, suggesting that these could be combined nicely.

With the ability to assemble these mesh-backed sheets of cork ’tiles’, our current stumbling block is the cutting process. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, if you have suggestions for a suitable method of cutting these discs, we’d love to hear from you!

I had hoped the laser cutting would provide a clean surface that needed no additional finishing, but results suggest this method is not a suitable option.

The depth of the cut did not even reach the centre axis of the cork before burning occurred.

We had similar results when testing the laser cutting on synthetic stoppers. While the synthetics did not burn, the cut did melt — causing the discs to fuse back together as the laser penetrated.

This suggests a return to our original thoughts of some type of shearing process.

The precision shear used by printers to trim lifts of printed paper give an excellent finished cut.

If you know of equipment or a process that would be suitable, we’d love to hear from you.

We’re looking for cork slicing equipment that would be suitable for trimming used wine corks into consistent thickness discs similar to the ones shown in this photo.

If you can recommend the best equipment or process to accomplish this — or if you operate equipment in the lower mainland area of British Columbia, we’d love to hear from you!

We are also looking for remanufacturing processes suitable for the synthetic wine stoppers that find their way into the natural corks we collect. So ideally this equipment would also be suitable for synthetic stoppers.

If you have equipment that you think would be suitable, please let us know and we can provide a batch of natural corks and synthetic stoppers for testing.

All 4 corks shown in the right of this photo are synthetic. You can see how good a match the second cork is to the natural one on the far left. However the 3 on the right are all obviously synthetic. When it comes to manually sorting wine stoppers the best solution is a quick visual difference.

Despite the best efforts of our cork recyclers, synthetic stoppers still make up about 20% of the total volume we collect and when they’re a close visual match to natural cork it really slows down the sorting process. To date there is no automated method to sort these material since their characteristics are very similar.

Calling all process innovators — if you have a method in mind, we’d love to hear from you!