ReCORK has collected 110 million natural wine corks for recycling!

Yup you read that right, 110 million! It’s taken us 12 years of working consistently with Collection Partners across the country and we're super excited to have reached another awesome milestone. We’re incredibly grateful to all of the businesses and individuals that have shown belief in our vision and worked with us to get us to this point. We also won't be resting here! Our momentum is steadily growing and we look forward to making an ever-increasing impact for the good of our planet. But for now we'll take a minute to indulge in a little celebration of what we've achieved.

110 million is the kind of number that makes you go ‘golly-gosh, gee-whizz, holy-moly’ at the same time as being totally impossible to comprehend. What does 110 million corks even look like? With the help of a trusty calculator and some investigative Googling, we’re here to let you know.

110 million corks is literally enough to stretch all the way into tomorrow!

This seems a ridiculous claim, but hear us out. If you laid every cork out end-to-end they would stretch halfway across the Pacific Ocean from the west coast of California. The last of the corks would land just the other side of the International Date Line in the middle of the ocean, where the date is one day ahead of the date at the start of the cork chain. If this has confused more than it’s helped, read on.*

*We recommend against spending too long thinking about how if you travel west you move through earlier and earlier time zones of today and end up in tomorrow. 

The same chain of corks would reach from where we’re sitting in Vancouver, BC, all the way down to the border of Honduras in Central America.*

*If you’re sitting in rainy Vancouver we also recommend against spending too long thinking about how nice it would be to be on a tropical beach in Central America. 

Still can’t wrap your head around 110 million corks? Let’s try something more relatable!

The corks you’ve helped us collect for recycling weigh as much as 2.9 Statues of Liberty. 

110 million corks weigh as much as 300 Ford F-150s.

They even weigh us much as a small army of NHL Offensive Linemen. If you don’t know what an offensive lineman is, it’s one of the offensively enormous, uh, enormous offensive guys whose job is to act as a wall of lycra-clad strength and determination that batters away the wave of juggernauts trying to sack the quarterback. Each Offensive lineman weighs around 315 lbs.

Here’s how many of them you’d need to match the weight of our corks.

That’s 4190 football players.

Ok so that’s a LOT of cork. But what’s even more impressive is if you consider how much wine it represents. Assuming the average bottle size of 750ml, at a conservative 3.5 glasses per bottle, it’s 385 MILLION glasses of wine! 

So what can we do with all that cork? We’ll use it to replace fossil fuel foams and plastics in a range of products. We’re working on a new formulation for our recycled cork that we’re sure will have far-reaching implications for the footwear industry and beyond. We won’t be ‘spending it all at once’ so to speak, but if we were to, here’s what we could make.

555,555 198* Blocks or 4.4 million pairs of carbon-negative District footwear.

So there you have it. A remarkable amount of cork, collected by the efforts of the remarkable people who care about their planet enough to work with us to make a real difference; that’s you!