(Independent) - It is perhaps the most middle-class of debates: should a wine bottle have a traditional cork or the more convenient but environmentally questionable screw top? But now a third contender is set to enter the dinner-party fray.

The manufacturer of the Select Bio cork, which goes on sale at Waitrose this weekend, claims its new plant-based wine stopper is the first carbon-neutral, fully re-cyclable wine cork on the market.

The stopper, which looks and feels like a traditional cork, isn’t made from the stripped bark of a cork tree but rather from a plant-based biopolymer derived from Brazilian sugar cane, which is normally used to produce biofuels.

Its manufacturer says it is fully recyclable and has a smaller carbon footprint than traditional corks, plastic corks and aluminium stoppers, long criticised for releasing up to 25 times more CO2 than traditional stoppers.

The cork’s manufacturer, US-based firm Nomacorc, already makes plastic wine corks and has grown its business to account for a 20 per cent share of the worldwide wine-closure market.

However, the biopolymer stopper may not be welcomed by all conservationists, following a run of reports from WWF which have argued that traditional Portuguese and Spanish cork production is vital for maintaining the region’s bio-diverse forests and providing homes to endangered species, such as the Iberian lynx and Barbary deer.