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Jordan chalks business success to limestone riches – AFR


Long before whiteboards, projectors and laptops made their way into modern school classrooms, teachers relied on humble, dusty, sometimes squeaky blackboard chalk – a material that has been a Jordanian success story.

Chemical engineer Salah Aloqbi recalls sitting on a bus in Amman in 1995 when he had the idea that would lead to his company. More than two decades later, it has 150 employees and exports to more than 100 countries.

Chalk, a white, soft limestone, was formed eons ago when the shells of tiny sea creatures were crushed to the seafloor – and inland Jordan in the Middle East is blessed with vast deposits.

“It was a groundbreaking idea,” recalls 49-year-old Aloqbi, who founded the Jordan Chalk Manufacturing Company.

“I was just getting back from work at the Jordan Carbonate Company when I heard a radio interview saying that the calcium carbonate the company produces is used in various industries in Jordan – except for the chalk industry.”

Aloqbi considered how to make blackboard chalk, which until then had been entirely imported, to derive added value from the calcium carbonate, which is also used to make white cement to make soil less acidic and toothpaste more abrasive.

Seven years later, he opened a small two-room factory with just five workers in Karak Governorate, south of Amman, and began experimenting, first by pulverizing the porous material with a meat grinder.

“But the chalk we were producing back then was no longer used in the world, so we moved on to making dust-free medicinal chalk,” he said, referring to a carbonate-based grade with larger particles.

– the right stuff –

Some 2,149 attempts later, the businessman proudly said he found the right formula for dust-free chalk, creating a “very strong export opportunity” that now pushes his company to produce 10 billion pieces a year.

Jordan has an almost endless supply of raw materials, with the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources estimating that the country’s “limestone reserves exceed 1.3 billion tons”.

Limestone is the common form of calcium carbonate CaCO3, the main component of chalk.

“It occurs to me that this is an outdated product, but the truth is we are struggling to meet the huge demand,” Aloqbi said as he inspected hundreds of boxes en route to the UK and Germany, Mali and Morocco .

Available in a wide range of colors, the chalk pieces are used in art and play around the world.

The company has also expanded into colored pencils and modeling clay, and is the only manufacturer of chalk pencils in the country.

Today, the company sits on 7,500 square meters of land and provides coveted jobs in a country where the unemployment rate has risen to 25 percent in the past year, about the same as the poverty rate.

“Most of us are from villages in Karak governorate,” said one employee, 28-year-old Sundus Majali. “More than half of the workers are women.”

Initially, she said, “It was difficult for parents to let women work… But today they don’t have a problem with it, mostly because the factory is safe, unlike other jobs.”

Another colleague, Alaa Aloqbi, 33, said: “The factory has created job opportunities at a time when life was getting difficult”.

#Jordan #chalks #business #success #limestone #riches

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