Restaurants and wineries in Oregon and California are now collecting wine corks for reuse. If you want to join in, you're probably out of luck. As of now, there are only three public collection points: two in Napa, California, and one in Oregon; they're keeping the program small while they work out the kinks.
Recycle Wine Corks with ReCork America
Apparently one issue is that it may consume more energy to collect and transport the corks—it takes 300,000 wine corks to yield 1 ton of recycled material, which can be turned into a number of products such as flooring. Most cork product factories are made in Spain or Portugal, near where cork trees grow, so that might be part of the logistics problem. We're hoping they can work out the transportation issues or figure out a more local use for used cork, as there's certainly enough of it. The company behind ReCork America is Portugese cork producer Amorim Irmãos, and they make 3 billion corks each year.
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I've been saving my own corks to reuse. A little glue and a collection of corks can yield a nice trivet.
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Lots of small mom-and-pop restaurants here in Paris fill the a narrow space in store window with their used wine corks. It's a fun look from the street side, and allows them to use the lower half of the interior window as wall space.
I use slices of my old wine corks for everything from steadying wobbly tables to sliding under planters on the floor to give breathing space.
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