Candles for V-Day

            Valentine’s Day is a day filled with romance, including chocolates, candles, wine, and jewelry. However, underneath the surface, it’s really just a consumer holiday that plays off of others’ hard work and sacrifice. Candles are a great gift for someone, easy to buy and relatively easy to make, right? Actually, candles can be pretty dangerous to produce. There are many different kinds of candles that can be made from various resources, including paraffin, beeswax, and soy wax to name a few. Candles don’t just begin at the wax stage though. The majority of candles are made out of paraffin wax, a byproduct of petroleum, which is produced in oil refineries from crude oil.

Source:

            Let’s start the adventure at gaining and processing crude oil. Paraffin is considered a natural resource. Wax produced by plants built up from hundreds of millions of years ago has been buried in the Earth’s crust and transformed into crude oil through heat and pressure. Petroleum companies harvest this crude oil and take it to factories to process it. These factories are where the process starts to be dangerous.

           

Location:

            The petroleum that is extracted from the crude oil is done so at oil refineries. In the world there are over 100 companies that have oil refineries in them. The largest refineries are located in

·         India

·          Venezuela

·          Singapore

·          USA (Texas)

·         Saudi Arabia.

This gives a picture of how global candles really are. When I started this research I was under the impression that candles were relatively local and did not have much globalization in the market. After the petroleum, diesel, and kerosene are extracted from the crude oil in these refineries, the excess material, called paraffin, the part which cannot be used for much else, is bought to produce candles.

Conditions:

Unfortunately, paraffin is only attainable after going through the process of refining the oil. This means that oil refinery workers are responsible for producing the paraffin as well. The conditions for processing the oil are dangerous, including asbestos exposure which can result in:

•     Mesothelioma
•     Pleural plaques
•    Asbestosis
•   Lung cancer

In addition to these chemical exposure risks, petroleum being extracted from the crude oil has a reputation for being highly flammable and easily explodes. Not only are workers paid to separate the crude oil and petroleum from each other, but they are also responsible for the upkeep of the items, like pipes, furnaces, and reactors. They aren’t paid more to do these jobs. Recently the salary of these workers has been cut between 15-50%, to a point where some workers make between 70-90 dollars a day, if they work 7 days a week. 

After the paraffin is extracted though, the candle making process is actually quite simple and safe. The wax is melted down so it can be shaped and injected with scents and colors (the wax is white and colorless). This can be done relatively easily and one person can make up to a thousand candles in a day. A wick is placed in the candle, it is made out string or cord and then covered in some more wax, which keeps the flame burning. 
Some major candle companies include Yankee Candle and Sunset candles.
Yankee Candle buys their paraffin wax from any number of the oil refineries (generally very cheap, as the product can really only be used as an insulator and wax candles). They then melt their wax and place it into containers to shape the candles. 

The globalization comes from the oil refineries, but factories create the opportunity to easily mass produce candles. The work is not highly intensive and therefore not necessarily outsourced.
























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