Our Cork Oaks

Everything starts in the forest. The cork oak stand is the first department of a cork stoppers factory. To carefully harvest the cork bark, without causing damage to the cork oak trees, is one basic element to transfer this huge richness to the next generations. Here, is carried out the first and indispensable selection, from which depend all the following processing steps, and also the final quality of every product. For this reason, Molinas cork factory, already since many years, carries out a strategy addressed to the selection, purchase and direct managements of many cork oak stands. The careful harvesting the raw cork bark, without damaging the cork oak tree, is the basic element to transfer this great richness to the next generations. The first selection of the raw material is made in the cork oak stand; from this selection depend all the following steps of the processing and the final quality of every single product. Since many years, Molinas cork factory implemented a strategy geared to the selection, purchase and management of many cork oak stands, not only in the most Sardinian suitable areas, but also in Tuscany; over the years, the wooded property owned by Molinas cork factory attained a surface of 8.000 ha.

In these cork oak stands, that are also a huge environmental and natural resource, dozens of workers are constantly engaged in careful maintenance works of the cork oak trees and also of the underwood, with the aim to safeguard the fragile equilibrium of the global system, including the biodiversity finding there its habitat and sustenance, but, above all, to assure that in these forests, the cork bark quality could constantly improve. All these factors are prerequisite to obtain more and more performing products and capable to answer to all the requests and requirements of our customers. A remarkable industrial effort, that assures to Molinas cork factory an absolute primacy among all the cork stoppers facilities: actually, Molinas is the only cork factory able to assure a total control of the production flow, from the forest up to the supply of the finished products. This specific activity gain an extraordinary value in the perspective of the widest safeguard of an extraordinary environmental resource, whose importance is too often neglected.

In fact, the cork oak stand, thanks to its capacity to grow in arid soils and climates as those bordering the Mediterranean western basin, represents an important barrier to the desertification process now threatening also big areas in the southern Europe; being able to stand long drought periods, with its foliage avoids the dehydration of the ground beneath protecting also many other vegetable species living in a perfect symbiosis in the cork forest. As testimony of this extraordinary force, many vegetable patriarchs, that, with their impressive trunks and their luxuriant foliages face all the inclemencies since time immemorial , some of them also since 300 years. An environmental resource that contributes in a substantial way also to the oxygen release in the atmosphere, in a quantity 4 times superior than the absorbed CO2.