Warren Porter
USA
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Bag-a-Cork Program Engages a Community
A few years back, before I participated in Landmark’s Self-Expression and Leadership Program (SELP) program, I was looking for a way to become known in the wine industry here in Ontario, Canada. As a newcomer in the industry, I was focused on building a successful business and being recognized in the industry. I credit the SELP program for giving me the perfect templates I needed to forward both my objectives and wanted to take these lessons out of the sandbox and into the real world.While growing my business, I became inspired by a recycling program in Australia and founded a similar initiative in Ontario called Bag-a-Cork. The program manifests a very simple idea: the collection of discarded wine bottle corks and selling them to manufacturers, at a profit, thereby making money and preventing tons of cork (literally) from ending up in landfills. We approached Girl Guides of Canada, an organization that mentors young girls and women about citizenship and leadership development (much like the Girl Scouts in the U.S.) for their participation and quickly enrolled them into the concept.
Iron Gate Cellarage (my company) provides recycling bins to businesses, such as restaurants, bars, and liquor stores. Also, small bags are distributed to consumers for at-home collection. The general public commits to saving discarded corks and bringing them to specific collection locations. From there they are put on trucks and carried to a company who turn what would have been landfill into things like cork floor tiles, upholstery — even fishing poles.
This Bag-a-Cork venture took off. . Today, Girl Guides collect bins of cork in about 200 locations throughout the area, not only helping out our company, but learning about a community-oriented business, and seeing first-hand the many reasons recycling makes sense. In 2006 we collected over 6 tons of cork from th Toronto area alone.
Both my business and this non-profit initiative continue to grow. A large corporation recently agreed to help haul cork from what will soon be five hundred locations throughout Ontario. This year we will divert around fifteen tons of cork from entering landfills. The program has become so widespread, I’m known throughout the wine community as “the cork guy!” What pleases me most about Bag-a-Cork is how it involves young people — our future leaders — in thinking about new ways that business, community, and environmental issues can be solved creatively and jointly. We’ve established a grant for the Girl Guides, challenging them to take what they’ve learned in the Bag-a-Cork program and invent their own recycling programs and businesses. There’s even a Girl Guide badge with a cork on it! By inspiring others in the same way that the Landmark program inspired me, I’m happy to be able to share some of the knowledge that changed the way I work and live.
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