quinta-feira, 23 de junho de 2011
The Victorious Cork of PortugalPublished on 08 May, 2011
Although the present economic situation in the world today can cause much alarm this has proven to be a non-issue for Portugal's cork industry. The indomitable cork industry has managed to successfully fight its way back and has even forged new ground around the world which has allowed it to recover lost strength. Even though Portugal's cork industry happens to enjoy a multi-million euro success the industry is nevertheless just as robust in discovering new markets while reaffirming its existing ones.
As the producer of about 60% of the cork supply in the world Portugal is assured of being the primary exporter of the product. Most bottles of wine and champagnes around the world boast corks produced by Portugal but nowadays one can find that this product is also utilized in construction, fashion and interior decoration.
Dr. Joaquim Lima, the general director of the Portuguese Association for Cork, APCOR, announced to The Portugal News that the industry recognizes increased demand internationally which proves to be reassuring signs of recovery.
He went on to say that 2011 is expected to be an even better year for the industry than 2010 was.
Portugal's cork is very popular when it comes for use with champagne and Dr. Lima said that all the champagne in the world makes use of the natural cork as stoppers and it is invariably Portuguese.
He also said that any well-known champagne brand in the world is quite probably using cork from Portugal.
Cork has also enjoyed a rise in popularity when it comes to fashionable accessories and Pelcor, a Portuguese company that manufactures these items has helped to boost the product and has demonstrated most effectively just how versatile the product actually is.
Pelcor was responsible for exhibiting a range of accessories in New York's MOMO Modern Art Museum in 2010.
Also in 2010, in June at the 2010 Expo exhibition which was hosted in Shanghai, China, many of the visitors were amazed by the Portuguese Pavilion because of its cork-covered walls.
The Cork Information Bureau compiles the most up-to-date figures and according to those figures which were then forwarded to The Portugal News by APCOR, 2010 saw a grand total of 156,198,218kg of cork exported with 93 million of those kilos going to the European Union.
What this means financially is that €754,330,278 was the total revenue which means that €446,998,474 was garnered from Portugal's EU counterparts.
Besides this the industry has also created many thousands of much needed jobs for many people.
Portugal's cork industry has around 700 companies that operate within it and together they manufacture around 40 million cork bottle stoppers each day of which 35 million are manufactured in the north of the country.
According to information supplied by the Ministry for Labor and Social Welfare the industry actually employs in excess of 10 thousand employees.
Among the 26 fellow EU state members the three top most importers of the country's cork are Germany, Spain and France. The fact that France is only the 3rd largest importer of Portuguese cork it is interesting to note that they spend the most on it.
Germany imported just over 27 million kilos, while Spain imported 15 million and it also spent more than Germany on the cork, paying over €78.5 million. Germany spent around €72.2 million. This difference is dependent largely upon whether the cork is sold naturally or has already been processed.
But France leads the import race having imported over 14 million kilos contributing more than €154 million toward the total revenue.
This is why Dr Lima affirmed that France is the country's most important market.
Interestingly between 2007 and 2010 the cork used for bottle stoppers actually declined by 4% while cork used in the field of construction, such as in paving, insulation and rendering, grew by 7%. This is a phenomenal occurrence and is heavily influenced by countries such as Germany.
The reason for this, according to Dr Lima, is because Germany uses the cork they import not only as wine stoppers but also in construction.
Germany considers cork to be a useful material when it comes to building and insulation but also has decorative purposes.
Market monitoring company AC Nielsen has discovered that countries like the US tend to prefer natural cork in place of other materials like plastic and aluminium. It also showed that when natural cork stoppers were utilized in the US's leading 100 wines sales actually increased by 14%. Wine bottles making use of other types of corks declined by 13%.
APCOR launched an international campaign and this has resulted in more advancement for the industry. It has demonstrated cork to be a favoured natural and sustainable product contrary to synthetic alternatives that are detrimental to the wellbeing of the planet.
APCOR's campaign is not confined solely to the US however, where it is known as 100% Cork, but also in other countries and is expected to continue until August, costing around €21 million.
The APCOR campaign, aptly called 100% Cork Campaign, was introduced at the site of the world famous Macy's superstore in New York City. Financed partly by APCOR and partly by Cork Quality Council it has proven to be one of the biggest ones of its kind to be carried out internationally in order to promote a product of Portuguese origin.
Published in Portuguese Life
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Portuguese cork
Cork oak trees can live more than two centuries and start produce cork at around 25 years. Every nine years the bark is extracted and cork is used for several applications. Cork oak is a native tree species in Portugal and is responsible for a typical Portuguese landscape known as montado. Cork oak montados are in general managed as an agro-forestry system and its an ecosystem with many wildlife characteristic species.Portugal is main cork world exporter. Although one of the main cork uses are cork stoppers there are other uses such as the shoes industry, insulation of houses, furniture, traditional crafts and new fashion clothes.
The use of cork in new products has been well succeed. In October 2009 the Portuguese architect David Mares, with 26 years old, was the People’s Prize Winner in an international contest design promoted by the New York Guggenheim Museum. His proposal was the CBS – Cork Block Shelter, which is a cork shelter located in Vale dos Barris in the Portuguese Arrabida Mountain. “In a microclimate that ranges from the dry heat to damp cold, the application of cork is a good way of thermally isolating the shelter and also providing acoustic insulation for study/sleep.” In the North of Portugal, Esposende, a 150 meters house was covered with cork bricks and got a name from the locals as the “cork stopper”. Five Portuguese designers from Corque Design atelier have been using cork to produce objects for the daily life such as chairs, tables etc.
There is an estimated area of 700,000 hectares of cork oak montados in Portugal. This area is mainly distributed in the southern part of the country in the Ribatejo and Alentejo regions, being the biggest forest cover with this forest tree species. Nevertheless, cork oak forests also exist in Spain and in other parts of the Mediterranean basin such as countries from the North of Africa. Cork oak trees are well adapted to the Mediterranean climate characterized by the mild winters and the dry and hot summers.
Portuguese cork gets wings as stoppers war rages on
LISBON |
(Reuters) - Making cork fly is easy, just pop a bottle of bubbly. But imagine a plane with wings largely made of pressed cork soaring through the skies.
From aircraft in the sky to the microscopic depths of the cork oak genome, researchers in Portugalare working to ensure a high-flying future for cork -- light, natural fire retardant -- even if demand for traditional bottle stoppers keeps waning.
Stubby, leafy oaks, bark carefully stripped from the trunks, line the road leading to the French-owned DynAero aircraft plant in Portugal's central-south Alentejo region -- the world's main cork growing area.
Plane parts designed and molded here could help shape the future of a national industry that employs some 12,000 workers, exports over 1 billion euros ($1.4 billion) a year in cork -- more than 2 percent of total exports -- and helps prevent Portugal's drying south from becoming a desert.
Portugal's annual output of 157,000 tonnes of cork is just over half of the world's total.
DynAero's desire to build its ultralight two- and four-seat planes from cork instead of plastic seems only natural in such a place, but there is more to it than the material's abundance.
"Year after year, cork wine bottle closures are getting replaced by new materials. Producers know they have to go to more sophisticated applications," said DynAero director Philippe Sence, explaining the reasons behind the "Aerocork" project, launched last year jointly with three Portuguese firms.
Among them is the world's largest cork producer Corticeira Amorim, struggling to recover market share in the bottle stopper market, reduced to 70-75 percent from over 90 percent since the 1990s by the advance of metal screw caps and plastic closures.
With cork industry revenues sliding up to 20 percent during last year due mainly to the impact of the global downturn on the wine market, it is yet unclear how the sector will emerge from the crisis since screw caps notably reduce bottling costs.
"There's the global crisis and the sectoral problem -- the attack of alternative closures and bag-in-the-box packaging. Screwcaps are trying to steal market share from both cork and plastics," said Joaquim Lima, head of APCOR cork industry group.
APCOR is launching a 20 million euro cork promotion programme abroad this year -- its largest ever.
Corticeira CEO Antonio Rios de Amorim said that while the fight to recover cork closures' market share against alternative stoppers was the company's top priority, research into new applications was key for future development.
"The Aerocork project is a new area of development for cork composite materials, but it uses the already successful experience in applications like kayak-building," he said.
The prototype cork plane should be ready this year.
RESISTANT TO FIRE, OIL PRICE SHOCK
The Aerocork partners aim to replace light porous plastic PVC with cork composite in the fuselage, wings and flaps of light aircraft, where it is coated with carbon fiber sheets.
Far from being a return to the wood-and-canvas planes from the early aviation history, the cork-carbon combination is not only light but possesses fire retardant properties. Shredded cork is already used in the thermal protection coating on the Space Shuttle's external fuel tank.
In nature, the unique cellular bark protects cork oaks from frequent forest fires. Even in Australia -- one of the main promoters of screw cap use in wine -- last year's deadly fires in Victoria state have triggered a debate on replacing flammable eucalyptus plantations with cork oak.
Last year's jump in oil prices that made oil-based PVC too pricey and environmental concerns about PVC output and recycling are also among the reasons DynAero wants a new material.
"We know that after a few years PVC will no longer be used, certainly by us and most likely by others in the industry. It is a nightmare in terms of ecological aspects," Sence said. "Our idea is to sell cork-carbon parts to other firms in the future."
Cork is harvested every nine years during the oak's 200 year lifespan without damaging the trees, making the cork industry one of the world's greenest and naturally sustainable.
Cork makers use the environmental argument in their fight against artificial closures, and they have the World Wildlife Fund on their side, warning that the switch to non-cork closures could destroy the bulk of western Mediterranean cork forests.
GOING MOLECULAR
In another pioneering research, Portuguese scientists are working on the sequencing of the cork oak genome, which could improve the quality of cork, eradicate "sudden death" disease in cork oaks and better prepare them to resist climate change.
"Desertification in southern Europe is on the rise and cork oak stands help to prevent it. Knowing the genome, we can select the trees that better resist drought," said Prof. Candido Pinto Ricardo at Lisbon's Chemical and Biological Technology Institute.
Since it takes over 40 years to harvest the first useable cork, classic genetic selection works too slow to see and study the results of crossings in a scientist's lifetime.
"But with the genome sequence, we'll know if a month-old seedling can produce high-quality cork," Pinto Ricardo said.
(Editing by Paul Casciato)
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