Calcium Carbonate Not Just For Your Health

Calcium Carbonate — Not Just for your Health

CaCO3 or calcium carbonate in chemistry. Does it make sense to you?

Although you hear about this chemical compound before and see it as one of the ingredients in calcium supplements, there are still things that you need to know beyond the finished product. Read on and the rest of this article and learn more about this chemical compound.

Calcium carbonate, as mentioned earlier, is commonly used as a supplement. But there are also other uses of this chemical compound, which will be discussed in the later part of this article.

Aside from the aforementioned applications, calcium carbonate is also a natural ingredient of various elements. It is one of the active ingredients in agricultural lime, as well as a natural substance that can be found on rocks all over the world. Furthermore, it is also one of the major components of sea shells and the shells of the snails. Even the shells of the chicken’s egg contain an estimated 95 percent of calcium carbonate.

Calcium carbonate that is used in the industry is sourced out from minerals or rocks such as calcite, limestone, chalk, and marble by means of quarrying or mining. Pure calcium carbonate which is used in processing foods or pharmaceutical applications is generated from a pure source, normally from marbles, and prepared by adding another chemical compound which is the carbon dioxide into the calcium hydroxide solution where the calcium carbonate precipitates out of the chemical reaction.

As mentioned earlier, calcium carbonate is used on various applications. These are as follows:

• It is mainly used in the construction application, whether as a building material (marble for instance) or limestone aggregate for road building purposes. It is also an active ingredient of the builder’s lime together with the cementor.

• It also used as an extender in commercial paints, particularly in emulsion paints where thirty percent of the paint’s net weight is either marble or chalk.

• It is also used as a filler in plastics.

• Calcium carbonate that is in the form of fine ground is important ingredients in the microporous film used in baby nappies.

• It is also used on adhesive applications, particularly in ceramic tile adhesives where it contains seventy to eighty percent limestone.

• It is mainly employed as whiting elements in ceramics application.

• It is the main component of the blackboard chalk.

• It is now used as an alternative to kaolin with regards to glossy paper production.

It is not just for your health—it also serves other purposes as well. So do not be surprised if the chalk that you are using in your classroom has the same main content as of the supplement that you are taking everyday.