Where Does Cork Flooring Come From

Cork flooring is most popularly harvested manufactured and sourced in southern europe with portugal being one of the most prominent regions from which cork comes.

Where does cork flooring come from. Where does cork come from. Every nine years the outer bark of the trunk and major branches is carefully stripped by hand using a specialized cork axe to remove the outer bark from the tree. Cork can come stained in a variety of hues ranging from dark chocolate to pale honey. Below is a photo of a stripped.

These floors can be a little expensive and their installed cost per square foot can be close to a good quality ceramic tile floor. Where does cork flooring come from. Later strippings which are made about nine years aside for a few hundred years give cork of a finer quality. Cork is an excellent gasket material.

You can also get cork flooring stained green blue red or virtually any color you desire. Two thirds of the world s cork provide comes from spain and portugal where the cork oak is cultivated extensively. Just about every tree has an outer layer of cork bark but the cork oak quercus suber is the primary source of most cork products in the world including wine bottle stoppers. These veneer patterns appear on the top layer of most cork floors.

This is where cork flooring and all other cork comes from. This is an area where the cork oak species is plentiful and where hand harvesting is most practical. Just like the grain of oak is different from maple or walnut so there are different grain patterns of cork. Cork is nearly tasteless and odorless resists deterioration and is greater than 50 air by quantity.

Cork flooring is environmentally friendly and cork is considered a renewable and sustainable natural resource. Cork s elasticity combined with its near impermeability makes it suitable as a material for bottle stoppers especially for wine bottles cork stoppers represent about 60 of all cork based production. Removal of the bark is always done by hand due to the sensitive nature of the removal. Frank lloyd wright made cork floor products prominent in the very early 20th century using it in much of the household and also industrial buildings he designed.

Cork is composed of non porous cells that divide the exterior bark from the gentle interior bark. Cork has an almost zero poisson s ratio which means the radius of a cork does not change significantly when squeezed or pulled. Since cork is a natural material the exact look of each piece will vary slightly although in its natural unstained state it tends to be a pale tan or brownish color.