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Baking Soda- Natural, Safe?
Always follow the money.
A. Rieber Staff WriterI have been finishing up the information card that will be attached to our “All Natural” shirt. On the card, I want to give everyone some alternatives to using chemical-based products, both in the house and outside. I found that many popular chemical cleaners can be changed out with natural products that are plant-based with essential oils.
Baking soda was mentioned everywhere. It made me wonder what baking soda really is, besides being sodium bicarbonate. I read in numerous books that baking soda is a great cleaner and is a natural way to cut grease. In fact there are books written about baking soda and all the wonderful things that it can do. You can google “baking soda uses”, you will receive over seven million hits from all different sources claiming different uses for baking soda.
The more I read about the positives and countless uses, the more I wondered how baking soda is actually created. I read here and there that it was found naturally. I also read that it is chemically created. I began to think about how abundant this common household product is in America which made me want to find out where exactly we get it from.
According to the University of Wisconsin extension service, baking soda is derived one of two ways. It can be manufactured by passing carbon dioxide and ammonium through table salt. The byproduct is sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda. It can also be mined in the form of trona. Read the whole article HERE.
Trona is a sodium carbonate baring compound. About 30 – 50 million years ago, some volcanoes erupted in Wyoming covering a lake that was in the process of drying up. Today we mine the mineral and ash deposits that are collected in Wyoming in the form of trona roughly 800 to 2000 feet under the earth’s surface.
The Wyoming Mining Association website has useful details on how trona is then further processed into soda ash, or sodium bicarbonate or baking soda. Take the time to read the mere paragraph on their website by CLICKING HERE, and press processing on the top drop down button.
So there I had it, baking soda, a deposit of mineral and ash from a dried up lake that we mine 1000 feet under the surface and process into a powder that works wonders. Almost satisfied, another nagging question hit my thoughts, how is this mined 1800 feet underground safely?
I continued to look under the Wyoming mining association and found a really neat, colored pamphlet describing all about mining trona. Take a look by CLICKING HERE. They mined over 17 million tons of this compound in 2012 alone. The entire processing plant is ran off coal, another major industry for Wyoming.
The most interesting of all is when you click the trona tab on the left. Under the introduction tab on the top, when you click it you get to this page. If you scroll down in the text box, you see some of the Wyoming Trona Companies listed. The four large chemical companies listed there offer a wide range of products including agriculture chemicals, pharmaceutical chemicals and fortified nutrients.
The information card for the “All Natural” shirt will not contain information promoting using baking soda.
That brings me to the next question, is baking soda really natural? I’ll leave that for later…