Cork Light Pendants Glow With Recyclable Sustainability

It's used to seal up our wine bottles and create kitchen trivets and fashion accessories such as rings, bracelets and even handbags, but do you really understand why cork is enjoying its time in the spotlight as one of the most ideally sustainable materials found in nature?

The Cliff Notes version of the story is that cork is a constantly renewable material obtained from a special type of oak tree that regenerates its stripped bark every 9 to 10 years.

Amazingly, even though their protective outer layer is completely removed, cork producing forests -- the majority of which are located mostly in Portugal -- are not harmed from the process and can actually live up to 150 years in spite of repeated harvests.  

60% of the harvested bark is used to produce an estimated 13 billion wine corks per year (which is the equivalent of 52,000 tons worth), but there is always a lot of waste generated -- specifically, small little corky bits and pieces shooting everywhere.

Given the fact that cork is so easy to reuse (since it responds well to heavy compression), London designer Benjamin Hubert has created a line of floating pendant lamps for the notable Danish design brand Unique Copenhagen using recycled scraps.

Manufactured in a Portuguese factory (which makes sense since that is effectively cork ground zero for the wine cork industry), each lamp shade is hand carved out of huge solid compressed blocks of recycled cork using traditional wood working techniques.

They look interesting, don't they?  When they're illuminated, I like them even better.