Short Green Study on Candle Jars

Here we are, after Christmas, after New Years, after many other holidays one might have been celebrating. I hope you enjoyed it all! I did.

Nevertheless, I have been looking for a solution to one particular recycle problem. We use candles. For some of our workshops, my wife has found candles she likes most, for various reasons: The don’t smell and are unscented, they develop hardly any smoke, almost all the wax is burnt and they burn for 100 hours. Moreover they are made from palm wax, which is, potentially, a renewable resource.

Of course, to be a sustainable or green product, there is more to it than mere renewability of the materials used. These particular candles lack there a bit from what I found out in regards to the palm wax. We also don’t know what the deal is with the dyes for coloring, the wick, the wick clip, the labels nor the production facilities, the conditions for the workers, the price fairness, etc. One disadvantage seems to be that they are imported from Germany. If that is the case, it means transportation over long distances and most certainly the use of fossil fuels. I have not researched everything I could around all these sustainability issues. Overall it looks to me they are not the worst and do have some green characteristics.

Back to my problem. These candles come in glass jars. The jars are made in a way so the candle itself can under normal conditions not just slide out of it, when tilting it upside down, by means of an inverted rim – a rim to the inside on the very top. Once a candle has burned completely down, unfortunately not all wax is gone. On the bottom a torus shaped amount of wax remains, which makes the glass jar un-recyclable, at least in our area.

What to do? Talking to the merchant, we found out they don’t take the jars back. We started giving them to local folks we know that make candles, but pretty soon they weren’t interested anymore, because of the wax on the bottom and the difficulty to get it out, as those jars are 8 inches high. Breaking them in order to clean out the wax and make the glass recyclable, doesn’t seem so great an idea and if we can solve the issue, a great waste.

Now, faced with this challenge, my mind started getting into gear. Here are the questions that have been forming in my mind:

• Not only do I want to be able to recycle the jars, but what about reusing them?
• Getting from every jar that we use over time the remaining wax and make another candle out of it, would be great. Also, we have been collecting wax from other candles over years and maybe we could melt all that to make new candles and use those jars as well?
• And could it be done so those home made candles look attractive enough to even sell them?
• Could it be done so that everything in this process is either reused or recycled – from the old stickers to anything used for cleaning the jars?
• Could it be also done in a way that requires no or little specialized tools and equipment?

I guess you see where I am going with this. Even as it seems to be not the perfect sustainable, green product, this candle and its jar could maybe form the basis of a small reuse, recycle operation and generate even some small pocket change for the jar or a new candle.

This makes all a lot of sense to me. We have and still are producing so many goods that are definitely not green or only to a small degree, but if we can start re-purposing, reusing or at least recycling them, we can affect and reduce the amounts of raw materials mined and used to make them. Of course this whole process needs to be done in a way that it does not use even more un-renewable, polluting and destructive energy and methods than making the item from scratch.

And, surprising as one might find this, my stance might sound radical to you – just don’t buy them if it is not important and really needed (something to consider for any purchase). Either make your own candles or find someone who makes them locally from all local resources.

As you can see from what I wrote above we need to learn to work together and find ways that work for all of us – like in our small family, which is worth another article about green living contradictions. I am sure though, if I find locally or would make candles that have similar characteristics as mentioned above, we wouldn’t buy them i our family.

Ok, now how to go about to be able to reuse those jars, remove the wax, etc. is for the next post.