Other Applications

The constituent parts of salt: sodium and chlorine play a vital part in today’s modern industries. It is more generally known that salt is widely used as a preservative for meats but this is the tip of the iceberg – there are many hundreds of processes and manufactured products that need salt.

By far the biggest consumer of salt however, is the chemical industry where salt is used as the raw material to produce chlorine, which itself is used to produce a huge range of different materials. Chlorine is used most commonly to produce ethylene dichloride (EDC) for PVC manufacture.

Other uses include:

  • Pulp and paper industry
  • Textiles
  • Waste and water treatment
  • Titanium dioxide pigment production
  • Seasoning
  • Petroleum additives
  • Dyes and intermediates
  • Pharmaceuticals
  • Drilling in the oil and gas industry

Salt is also the major component in the manufacture of synthetic soda ash which is necessary in the production process of glass and sodium silicate.

Examples of the numerous additional uses of salt include the manufacture of soap and rubber, metal processing, ceramics manufacture and leather tanning. Also, because they are transparent to infrared radiation, salt crystals can be used for making the prisms and lenses of instruments used in the study of infrared radiation.