How To Recycle Old Candles

Now that the trend is green, most people hesitate to throw away items that can be reused. Although you may not realize it, it is highly likely that you have items sitting around your home that you could recycle as well which is not only great for the environment but great for your wallet. Perfumed candles, tea light candles, and any other type of candles are a great example of an item that you can re-use to create new candles for your home since you likely have plenty of wax left over after the wick has burnt down. The following is a short guide that will help you learn how to recycle any type of perfumed candles, floating candles, and more.

To start off you need to prepare your candles by sorting into piles such as perfumed candles and non-scented candles and colored or non-colored candles. For example, vanilla scented candles would fall into the category of scented and non-colored usually while rose scented candles would fall into colored and perfumed candles. After you sort your candles it is easiest to grab the pile of unscented candles and non-colors to start. Prepare these candles by scrapping out as much of the previous wick as you can and cleaning off all dirt or other grime that may be in the wax.

After the candles are ready, place them in a melting pot and melt them into one solution. Using tongs or something similar, carefully remove any remnants of the wicks that you were unable to reach before. If the wax has a great deal of debris and wick pieces in it you may consider using an old strainer and running the wax solution through it to clean out the mess so that the wax is completely clean. Once the wax cools you can set it aside or go ahead and make new candles using molds and new wicks.

Now that you are done with this pile, you can sort through the scented colors pile and choose scented candles that are the same to clean and melt down together. You can also mix scents that you think will complement each other which sometimes will work out great and sometimes will not, but since they are leftover scented candles you do not have much to lose. As a general tip when working with colors however, it is best to choose similar candles to melt together as most mixes will come out brown.

Since you will not likely have as many matches of colored and perfumed candles these are great to use to make tea light candles or torch candles since they require less wax. You can also experiment a bit with the scented candles taking care to mix floral with floral scents and citrus with citrus scents because you may delightfully find a scent that is quite appealing. This is also a great activity for older children with supervision as it teaches them creativity and sustainability.