Duraflame blazes new trail

Escalating oil prices lit a fire under Stockton, Calif.-based Duraflame Inc. to shift its entire petroleum-based production to a biobased one. The privately owned company expects its current inventory of petroleum-based fire logs and fire starters to sell out by October, at which point Duraflame plans to begin stocking shelves solely with vegetable-based products.

Rising crude oil prices caused an increase in the price of petroleum wax used to make fire logs, as well as a decrease in quality, according to Chris Caron, Duraflame’s vice president of brand development. The organic materials have better burning properties than the materials coming from the petroleum industry, Caron says.

Both factors led Duraflame to create and market the industry’s first “all-natural” fire log in 2005. A year later, the company converted the production of its top-selling, six-pound Xtra fire log to a biobased wax. Large retailers such as Home Depot (NYSE: HD) and Sam’s Club, a membership-only warehouse club owned and operated by Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT), made commitments to sell exclusively Duraflame’s petroleum-free products, prompting the company to convert its entire line to biobased wax.

Duraflame expects to continue sharing shelf space with petroleum-based logs at Wal-Mart stores, which employ a two-supplier policy, Caron says. However, the retail giant issues a packaging scorecard that rates products on the greenhouse gas emissions of their materials procurement and production processes as well as transportation to market [see “Wal-Mart gets tough on wrap,” www.sijournal.com, Sept. 26, 2006]. Based on a life-cycle analysis, Duraflame claims the biobased logs produce 80 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than its previous line.

Incentives for the production and use of biofuels have increased over the past year [see “U.S. adopts renewable fuels standard,” www.sijournal.com, April 12, 2007] causing the cost of vegetable-based wax to catch up with petroleum, according to Caron. But biobased wax makes a better product, he adds, and “there is no promise that petroleum prices will go down. They will most likely go up.”

Duraflame holds 50 percent of the manufactured fireplace fuels category. Sales for 2006 remained relatively flat, due to a mild winter on the East Coast, according to Caron.