Monday, 2 May 2011

Only the EU could make a candle less environmentally friendly than a table lamp!

The American company, Scentsy, has just expanded into Europe and has already fallen foul of the EU's environmental laws.

Ingredients: Mercury, Phenol,
NaphthaleneStyrene
Scentsy make child-friendly candles that use the heat generated by a light bulb to melt a special wax of their own devising rather than a wick and flame.  It's a massive business in the US and they've just expanded into Europe with a distribution centre in Poland and a fledgling direct sales network in Germany and the UK.

But they can't sell their American "burners" in Europe because of EU environmental laws which ban the use of the incandescent bulbs that are required to melt the candle wax.  Instead, they have to use a heating element to reproduce the heat produced by the bulb and then add LED lights to reproduce the light produced by the bulb - two separate parts to do the work of one bulb using more resources to produce and more electricity to run (heating elements are, by their very nature, electrically inefficient).

Only the EU could make a candle less environmentally friendly than a table lamp!

Shameless plug: Mrs Sane is one of the UK's first Scentsy consultants