Baking Soda Facts

You likely have one or more boxes of baking soda in your home. Baking soda can be used for many purposes. It cleans homes, deodorizes furniture, exfoliates skin, kills mold, polishes silver, and more. You can use it to wash your hair, to make deodorant, and to take the stink out of sweaty clothes.


Baking soda comes out of the ground in the form of minerals nahcolite and trona, which are refined into soda ash (calcium carbonate), then turned into baking soda (sodium bicarbonate), among other things. Most of it comes from the United States, which contains the world’s largest trona deposit. Nahcolite, a naturally occurring sodium bicarbonate, is often found in evaporated lake basins. It is also mined in Botswana, Kenya, Uganda, Turkey, and Mexico.

Glass-making consumes about half of the soda ash and the chemical industry uses about a quarter of the output. Other uses include soap, paper manufacturing, and water treatment.