By Henrique Almeida For more than 150 years, Corticeira Amorim SA has thrived by buying slabs of bark stripped from cork trees in Portugal and transforming them into stoppers. The company annually produces billions of seals for the planet’s wine and champagne bottles. Today the light, spongy material is found in everything from clothing to insulation used in cars and high-speed trains as well as even space shuttles. It’s more sustainable than lumber as it’s harvested from trees that don’t need to be cut down. This means the trees can continue to serve as long-lasting carbon sinks. The only thing standing in the way of the cork market exploding is it takes decades to grow and regrow the material. That’s something Chief Executive Officer António Amorim hopes to change.  A cork oak in the Herdade de Rio Frio forest. Photographer: Goncalo Fonseca/Bloomberg Amorim is looking to shorten the time of the first harvest from 25 years to about 10 years through the use of drip irrigation. It’s a practice that’s been used for years to speed up the harvest of a variety of crops such as olive trees but it’s rarely been applied to cork farming because these trees are predominant in Portuguese and Mediterranean regions where there are recurrent droughts and long dry summers. Cork also isn’t a crop grown in a field, but rather a forest, which many farmers wouldn’t normally irrigate.
Until recently, Corticeira Amorim didn’t own any cork oak forests. In 2018 the Mozelos, Portugal-based company began buying land to develop irrigated cork oak plantations, with as many as eight times more trees per hectare than normal.  An extraction machine allows cork to be stripped quicker without damaging the inner bark. Photographer: Lara Jacinto/Corticeira Amorim Portugal, which produces around 50% of world’s cork supply, has seen the size of these forests decline by 3.6% between 1995 and 2015, according to the latest available data compiled by the government’s national forestry inventory. For some farmers the long waiting period that it takes for a cork oak tree to grow enough product hasn’t made planting them worth it. A newly planted tree requires at least 25 years before a cork stripper can remove the outer bark from the trunk with his bare hands. It then takes nine years for the bark to regenerate itself and another nine years to produce cork that’s good enough for bottle stoppers, which account for the bulk of Corticeira Amorim’s sales.  Cork oaks planted about 100 years ago in neat rows, in the Herdade de Rio Frio forest. Photographer: Goncalo Fonseca/Bloomberg The decades long waiting period has prompted farmers to invest in crops like olive trees or vineyards that generate faster financial gains. “Today, when people consider planting a cork tree, they think they are doing it for their grandchildren,” said Amorim, whose great grandfather founded the company in the northern Portuguese town of Mozelos in 1870. “We need to show that it’s possible to plant cork oak trees for our generation as well.”  Containers of cork wine stoppers manufactured at the Amorim & Irmaos SA factory in Santa Maria da Feira, Portugal. Photographer: Paulo Duarte/Bloomberg Corticeira Amorim recently acquired Herdade de Rio Frio, a huge forest estate near Lisbon. It’s there, in an area with about 5,200 hectares covered with cork oak trees alongside two large dams and manmade channels used to transport water from the River Tagus to be used for irrigation that Amorim is developing a central part of its so-called forest intervention program. “We currently have about 50 trees per hectare. But there is room to plant a lot more trees in the same area,” Nuno Oliveira, who oversees Corticeira Amorim’s forest properties, said as he walked along several cork oak trees at Herdade de Rio Frio.  Nuno Oliveira, who oversees Corticeira Amorim’s forest properties, in the Herdade de Rio Frio forest. Photographer: Goncalo Fonseca/Bloomberg The company will use drip irrigation in newly planted cork oak tree plantations until their first harvest in about 10 years. Once the trees are harvested, drip irrigation can stop, and the regular nine-year cycle of growth and harvest can continue. Corticeira Amorim aims to plant as many as 400 cork trees per hectare instead of the usual 50 and use plants cloned from trees that are considered to be stronger and produce better quality cork than others to increase the rate of success, he said. If it works, Amorim hopes other landowners will follow his lead and invest in irrigation systems for new cork plantations with more trees. One extra incentive for them, Amorim said, is that these trees are natural carbon sinks and could potentially be used to offer carbon credits that will help landowners pay for their investment. For now, however, Corticeira Amorim is focused on the end product. The company posted a record 1 billion euros ($1.11 billion) in revenue in 2022 and expects demand for cork to continue to increase in the coming years as consumers opt for more sustainable products. “My hope is that others are inspired by what we are doing,” Amorim said. “All we want is to have more cork to continue to grow in the future.” Click here to read the full version of this story as it appeared on Bloomberg.com. | 
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