Cork is one of the greenest alternatives there is to animal leather. Besides being waterproof, buoyant, elastic, fire resistant and unique in its appearance, it is a naturally harvested material, mainly originating in the cork oak forests located in the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Spain).

To extract cork from cork oak trees you may be surprised to hear that not one single tree is cut down. Instead, bark is peeled away and then the cork is carefully extracted by very highly skilled harvesters. The trees are in no way damaged – the bark is naturally renewable and grows back after nine years – preserving the forest in it’s pristine entirety, and enabling perpetual harvesting with no damage to the forest or ecosystem.

In fact, cork harvesting can help in the fight against global warming. How? At the age of twenty five the tree's bark can be harvested every nine years, for a period of over 200 years. While the cork is growing it is capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But it gets more interesting: each time the cork is harvested, the tree absorbs more CO2 to aid in the bark regeneration process. This means regularly harvested cork trees store three to five times more CO2 than those left unharvested.

This ability to renew itself is not the only superpower that cork possesses – cork is also completely biodegradable. And from a social point of view cork extraction from oak is also a highly skilled job, in rural areas where jobs are hard to come by, which pays very well, and helping to support viable rural communities.