Back in my energy bar-eating days, I was trying to find out if I could recycle the wrappers. The answer is no, although Clif Bar has an upcycle program that turns the wrappers into other items. The rub is that you have to sign up and at the time, it's 500 slots were full. But while I was doing my research I came across suggestions for how to recycle other items that you can't put in your recycling bin. One of them was wine corks. You can send your corks to a building company that turns them into cork floor and wall tiles (www.yemmhart.com). Cool, I thought, and started saving my corks. I'm not a big wine drinker so I have a handful stored away in my kitchen (a few others I had were plastic and said they could be recycled). You have to pay to ship them so it wasn't the most convenient.
That's why I was excited the other day when I saw a box in Whole Foods where you can drop off your corks for recycling. I wondered if it was new since I'd never seen it before. Then a few days later, I got a comment on my old post about energy bar wrappers that said to try to find out what groups near you are part of the Clif Bar upcycling program and send yours to them (hey, good advice. Maybe the subject of a future post). The commenter sends theirs to a group that recycles wrappers and corks. The poster said Whole Foods collects corks too (natural and synthetic). Hey, I actually know that, I thought. So I went to the Whole Foods website and found out it was a new program (you can read about it here). In the West, the corks will be sent to Western Pulp, where they'll be used to make wine shippers. In the Midwest, they'll go to Yemm & Hart. And in the East they'll be send to another company that makes products from old cork. So now you can bring your corks to Whole Foods. It's a lot easier than mailing them.
