Granulated Cork | Fromcork Portugal

Granulated Cork

The cork industry is remarkably sustainable. First of all, because because cork is a 100% natural product cyclically extracted from the trees without ever harming them — instead, each tree produces cork for nearly a century and a half and continues to live for up 250 years. Because cork is such a very rich raw material for many products, in the last decades numerous artificial materials have been developed as substitutes for cork in specific applications — like synthetic peas for referee's whistles, foam insoles for shoes, styrofoam for life preservers, for example. However, still none of those alternatives is a match for cork and no general substitute has been developed for its eclectic use in diverse applications.

Nothing can override cork's primacy at the service of the most varied needs. It is recognized as a truly unique material since ancient times. Did you know that cork bottle stoppers have been found in Egyptian tombs dating back thousands of years? And that Ancient Greeks already used cork to make fishing net floats, sandals and bottle stoppers? Two thousand years ago, Romans widely used cork in a large variety of ways too, including life jackets for fishermen. For hundreds of years, Mediterranean cottages have been built with cork floors and roofs to provide a soft walking surface and to keep out summer heat and winter cold.

Sustainability and Unlimited Creation

But the cork industry is also sustainable because during the creation of the products nothing is wasted. Even the cork waste and dust that remains from the transformation processes is recycled and automatically handled, beeing properly organized by grain size and type. After all, we are still talking about natural cork. That's how we obtain granulated cork, a raw material that can be used for numerous applications and a huge variety of purposes, like stoppers, cork sheets, insulating boards, acoustic panels, tiles for flooring, shoe soles, engine seals, terrariums for pets and many kinds of crafts.

Granules have different mesh and densities and choosing the right size depends how we intend to use them. Cork shaves that are obtained when producing cork stoppers, for instance, give us a huge variety of sizes and weights of granulated cork. In some industries, like the cars manufacturing and energy production, cork dust is often used to improve the quality of several other porous materials. The cork dust fills the holes of those materials, improving their quality and making them an effective insulating substance. Cork is indeed such a great insulating material that some years ago there were found in Greece several amphorae with about 2 thousand years filled with honey with virgin cork stoppers that were submerged in the sea and the honey inside them was intact.

Empowering Your Ideas

Granulated cork started to be used in 1890, when a german company developed a process for adding a clay binder to cork particles and producing sheets of composite cork that could be used for insulation. The following year, an american called John Smith developed a technique for producing pure agglomerated cork out of waste material by subjecting the particles to heat and pressure but without needing to add any binder. The next major development occurred in 1909 when Charles McManus invented a type of agglomerated cork that could be used to line crown caps. Since then, many other techniques have been developed to produce cork compounds with a variety of properties and appropriated for many and many uses.

Despite being granule or dust,Fromcork always guarantees that the material supplied to its clientes was submitted to careful cleaning steps and fumigation, ensuring that no impurity is in it. We can obtain both natural light granulated cork or black granulated cork and our clients can choose between a huge range of dimensions and weights. When submitted to high temperatures and pressure granulates recover cork's natural density and strength. From that point its use is again as strong and versatile as your imagination.