Do You Know What You’re Burning?

4 Wax Bases in 8 Years: The Story Behind Our Candle Collection Journey

Our journey to find the right wax base for the Skandinavisk candle collection took us around the world and back and revealed some uncomfortable secrets beneath the surfaces along the way.

(The following is a transcript of the video above.)

Today I’m going to talk to you about wax and our journey to finding the right wax base for our new collection. Because there are a lot of different wax bases available, and we’ve used most of them.

1. Paraffin

In 2013, when we launched, we used a classic paraffin wax base. Paraffin is pretty much the most popular wax base still today, but of course with paraffin it’s a byproduct of the oil industry and any extraction from beneath the ground can’t be replaced. Even though we used food-grade paraffin wax, we still felt uncomfortable that we were participating in something that wasn’t sustainable.

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2. Palm

So, in 2016, actually when we introduced our wooden lids, we also made another, less visible, change — we replaced that paraffin wax with palm wax. Palm oil is the most land-efficient crop on Earth. However, there are a number of issues associated with this crop, not least deforestation and monoculture agriculture. Now we were aware of the RSPO certification — Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil — and we choose to use RSPO palm. But we didn’t realise until later that there were four levels of certification and only two of them guaranteed sustainably farmed palm oil. We felt uncomfortable ultimately to stay with a palm base even though it had a great burn.

3. Soy

And we chose to move on again, to a soy wax base. Soy is another major global land crop. However, most soy is genetically modified, so we had to find a non-GMO soy base, and we were also looking to secure supply from a European source. But we couldn’t guarantee that, so often our soy had to be shipped in from overseas, which we didn’t really feel totally comfortable about.

4. Rapeseed

Last but not least — and isn’t it often true that when you go looking for something you end up finding it on your own doorstep — we came across the wax base that we now use for our Next Generation collection: Swedish rapeseed wax. Sustainably farmed, traceable, and non-GMO, and the Swedish border being only about 40km from where I’m sitting here in Copenhagen. Local as well.

All these wax bases look more or less the same to the untrained eye. All of them burn more or less the same to the expert candlemaker.

But there is an incredible degree of difference between where they come from.

Thanks for listening.

B The Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.