This September, in collaboration with Cork It, we shipped 16.7 cubic feet of corks to Emily Carr University for use in their industrial design faculty’s “New Wood Materials” class. We’re hoping that all the bright young minds in ECU’s Industrial Design program will develop products and processes that allow us to reprocess our recycled corks right here in Vancouver.
The 16.7 cubic feet we provided weighed 92 kg (203 lb) which represented ~21,000 corks. Processing corks here, rather than transporting them to Jelinek in Ontario, is more cost effective and will avoid the emissions resulting from their transport over 4,338 km (2,695 miles). According to the Texas Transportation Institute, shipping this weight over that distance by transport truck would result in 386 pounds of CO2 equivalent emissions —almost twice the weight of the goods being shipped!
So we should not only think about shopping locally, we should also think about recycling locally!
Let’s see what ECU’s best and brightest come up with. We’ll keep you informed.
