Once-in-a-previous-lifetime we had fishing poles with cork grips. The good ones were terrific, the others much less so. Turned out that the bad ones were made of a composite cork, pieces mashed together in a glue matrix. The good ones were actually sliced cork or cork blanks drilled to accept the rod buts (probably where the cork fragments came from).
My Leki trekking poles have composite cork grips and i don't expect them to last.
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