Jordan Chalks Up Business Success From Limestone Riches

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Prolonged prior to whiteboards, beamers and laptops entered fashionable college classrooms, instructors relied on the humble, dusty, occasionally screechy blackboard chalk — a product that has produced a Jordanian business enterprise accomplishment story.

Chemical engineer Salah Aloqbi remembers sitting down on a bus in Amman in 1995 when he hit on the idea that would lead him to build his enterprise. Additional than two many years later it offers 150 workers, with exports to extra than 100 nations.

Chalk, a white, smooth limestone, was formed aeons ago when the shells of very small marine creatures ended up compressed on the sea floor — and the landlocked Middle Japanese desert place of Jordan is blessed with wide deposits.

“It was a match-changing plan,” recalled Aloqbi, now 49, who started the Jordan Chalk Producing Corporation.

“I was returning from work at the Jordan Carbonate Enterprise when I heard a radio job interview expressing that the calcium carbonate created by the organization is used in different industries in Jordan — except the chalk sector.”

Aloqbi pondered how to make blackboard chalk, which was right up until then wholly imported, to gain added benefit from the calcium carbonate that is also employed to generate white cement, make soils a lot less acidic, and toothpaste much more abrasive.

7 yrs later on, he launched a small manufacturing unit in Karak governorate south of Amman, with two rooms and just five employees, and started out experimenting — originally by pulverising the porous material with a meat mincer.

“But the chalk that we made at that time was no extended used around the globe, so we moved to make dustless medical chalk,” he claimed, referring to a carbonate-based type with much larger particles.

Some 2,149 makes an attempt later on, the businessman mentioned proudly, he strike the proper formula for dustless chalk, creating a “really sturdy export opportunity” that now sees his organization develop 10 billion pieces a yr.

Jordan has a around endless supply of the raw substance, with the ministry of strength and mineral methods estimating the country’s “assets of limestone exceed 1.3 billion metric tons”.

Limestone is the popular kind of calcium carbonate CaCO3, the primary component for chalk.

“It comes to intellect that this is an out-of-date product or service, but the truth of the matter is that we are having difficulties to satisfy the wonderful demand from customers,” Aloqbi claimed as he inspected hundreds of cartons heading to Britain and Germany, Mali and Morocco.

The chalk items appear in a huge palette of colors and are employed for art and engage in all over the environment.

The company has also branched out into coloured crayons and modelling clay, and is the country’s only producer of chalk sticks.

Now, the firm sits on a 7,500 square metre plot and delivers sought-following employment in a state exactly where the unemployment fee soared to 25 per cent very last 12 months, about the very same as the poverty amount.

“Most of us are from villages in Karak governorate,” mentioned just one staff, 28-calendar year-outdated Sundus Majali. “Far more than half of the employees are girls.”

At very first, she said, “it was hard for parents to allow for women to work … But now they have no difficulty with that, especially for the reason that the factory is secure, not like other workplaces.”

One more colleague, Alaa Aloqbi, 33, said “the manufacturing unit has offered job alternatives at a time when everyday living turned tricky”.

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