Other industries

The sugar manufacturing industry uses lime to purify beet juice. Limestone is supplied by Nordkalk to the sugar refineries, which then make their own quicklime. The Miedzanka quarry in Poland supplies a large proportion of the limestone needed by the country's sugar refining industry. In addition Nordkalk also supplies the sugar refining industry with limestone from Storugns in Sweden and Vasalemma in Estonia.

Lime is a key ingredient in the manufacture of glass; almost a third of the glass is calcium carbonate. Quicklime and limestone powder are used in the manufacture of glass fibre.

The chemical industry uses limestone-based materials in the production of plastics, paint and glue, for example. Both carbonate products and slaked lime are needed in order to manu­facture the calcium chloride spread on unmetalled roads to reduce dust.

Lime powder and slaked lime are used as raw materials in both animal feeds and fertilisers. Furthermore, dolomite extracted as Nordkalk's deposit at Kurevere in Estonia is used in fertilisers.

The extremely finely ground calcite powder produced at Lappeenranta is used to make paints and glues. This is a powder ground to microscopically fine fractions, one of the range of flotated calcium carbonate products for which the name FC is used.

Wollastonite, a rare mineral that occurs together with limestone, is extracted and refined at Lappeenranta. The ceramics industry is the most important user of wollastonite; it is needed for glazing and for tiles, for example. The plastics industry exploits the needle-like characteristics of wollastonite to give many plastics their mechanical properties such as stiffness and strength to make them suitable for the purpose for which they are intended. Plastics that contain wollastonite are much needed in the automobile industry.

Considerable quantities of limestone products are also needed to neutralise industrial waste water and for cleaning flue gases at coal-fired power plants.

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