Jordan Chalks Up Business Success From Limestone Riches

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Very long in advance of whiteboards, beamers and laptops entered modern day university lecture rooms, instructors relied on the humble, dusty, in some cases screechy blackboard chalk — a content that has made a Jordanian business enterprise success tale.

Chemical engineer Salah Aloqbi remembers sitting on a bus in Amman in 1995 when he hit on the idea that would lead him to make his company. More than two many years later on it offers 150 team, with exports to a lot more than 100 countries.

Chalk, a white, smooth limestone, was formed aeons in the past when the shells of very small maritime creatures ended up compressed on the sea ground — and the landlocked Center Japanese desert place of Jordan is blessed with broad deposits.

“It was a game-changing concept,” recalled Aloqbi, now 49, who launched the Jordan Chalk Production Corporation.

“I was returning from get the job done at the Jordan Carbonate Business when I listened to a radio interview declaring that the calcium carbonate developed by the corporation is used in many industries in Jordan — apart from the chalk industry.”

Aloqbi pondered how to make blackboard chalk, which was right until then wholly imported, to obtain extra worth from the calcium carbonate that is also utilized to generate white cement, make soils less acidic, and toothpaste more abrasive.

7 years later on, he introduced a small manufacturing unit in Karak governorate south of Amman, with two rooms and just 5 staff, and commenced experimenting — to begin with by pulverising the porous material with a meat mincer.

“But the chalk that we created at that time was no for a longer period applied all-around the entire world, so we moved to produce dustless health care chalk,” he said, referring to a carbonate-centered variety with more substantial particles.

Some 2,149 attempts later, the businessman reported proudly, he strike the ideal system for dustless chalk, building a “incredibly sturdy export possibility” that now sees his organization produce 10 billion pieces a calendar year.

Jordan has a near unlimited supply of the raw material, with the ministry of power and mineral resources estimating the country’s “assets of limestone exceed 1.3 billion metric tons”.

Limestone is the typical variety of calcium carbonate CaCO3, the key component for chalk.

“It arrives to intellect that this is an out-of-date merchandise, but the truth of the matter is that we are struggling to satisfy the good need,” Aloqbi explained as he inspected hundreds of cartons heading to Britain and Germany, Mali and Morocco.

The chalk items arrive in a broad palette of colors and are used for art and participate in all around the earth.

The agency 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 sq. metre plot and provides sought-soon after employment in a nation in which the unemployment rate soared to 25 per cent very last yr, about the identical as the poverty fee.

“Most of us are from villages in Karak governorate,” stated a single staff, 28-yr-previous Sundus Majali. “Much more than half of the personnel are girls.”

At first, she reported, “it was complicated for parents to allow for females to operate … But today they have no trouble with that, specifically for the reason that the factory is safe and sound, not like other workplaces.”

A further colleague, Alaa Aloqbi, 33, claimed “the manufacturing unit has supplied task options at a time when lifetime turned tricky”.

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