Using cork in the cabin of a car may sound a bit out of the ordinary, but it all makes perfect sense for Mazda: the company began life in 1920 as a cork manufacturer known as Toyo Cork Kogyo.

Cork offers a high-performance, plant-based material as a sustainable alternative to animal leather and planet-polluting plastics.

Sustainable furniture is taking the design industry by storm, they’re a step towards making our homes and our daily lives more eco-friendly and sustainable. They’re an attempt to cast aside toxic materials, and instead, add furniture designs to our home that won’t rot away on Earth for years once we’re done with them. And, one such furniture design is the Gago rocking chair by Dam.

After a year of working on this project, reddish studio and monkey business reveal a new series of the brand’s classic toys — ‘corkers’ are body parts of animals, this time dinosaurs, which are applied to a wine cork. Once assembled, the piece looks like a little well-detailed figurine with a cork belly. 

Research suggests, compared to the control, experimental cork/wooden beehives demonstrated: a more regular pattern of internal daily temperature, more efficient winter thermoregulation, a shorter time lapse necessary for restoring the temperature of the hive after opening (referring to the brood chamber).

Cork is the name given to the bark of the cork oak. The cork oak, in turn, is the only plant species capable of producing cork with the highest quality, thus becoming the origin of a unique industry in the world that is vital for the sustenance of the Montado and for the Portuguese economy - so much so that cork represents 2% of the country’s exportations.