The barium carbonate we use in the pottery studio comes from the mineral barite. The words barium and barite are both derived from the ancient greek word barus, meaning physically heavy, burdensome, weighty or a deep and hollow sound, as in a “baritone”.  

The barium carbonate used in ceramics is a highly refined form and accounts for only a tiny portion of the barite mined today, from locations around the world.  The vast majority of barite is used as a component in the lubricating “mud” for drilling oil and gas.  In this use barium is valued for its inert nature and its tendency to settle into the depths and to fill cracks and voids.  Imagine a giant drill, boring into the earth, working its way slowly downward.  The barium rich mud flows, cooling the drill, seeping deeper and deeper, filling the fissures caused by the violent vibration.  This mud holds open the void, and is later pumped out to retrieve the oil or gas.   Like some other materials we use in the studio, barium is mined as a tool for mining, feeding the endless cycle of human extraction. 

Barium carbonate is used in ceramics as a component of glazes and as an additive to terra cotta clay bodies to reduce the “scumming” caused by the precipitation of soluble salt to the surface of the clay.  In glazes, barium produces a beautiful micro-crystalline texture, described in ceramics as a barium matte.  The tendency of barium to form crystals is also apparent in the often dramatic shapes of the barite mineral.  

The barium carbonate used our studio today is a %97 pure grade, packaged in bags labeled with the name Solvay. Solvay is a a multinational chemical company that was founded in 1863 in Belgium.  Today Solvay has offices and facilities throughout the world.  As we worked to locate the origin of the barium carbonate we use in the studio, it often felt as though the mineral had somehow followed its own nature, working its way into the deepest crevices of this sprawling multinational corporation.  

At the time of our research the website for the Solvay corporation listed several technical grades of barium, but no information about its mining or production.  The only contact information in the section of their website about barium was one phone number with an Italian country code.  After several days of repeatedly calling this number I finally contacted a man named Rocco Alessio who then gave me another phone number for a contact in Germany.  At this second number I reached Marcello Ferriera Dinardi who at the time was on a business trip in Mexico.  Mr. Dinardi works for a company called Kandelium, which until recently was part of the Solvay corporation, but became an independent company in 2021.   Mr. Dinardi oversees the Barium production facility in Bad Honnengin – a town with a population of 6,000 people on the bank of the Rhine river in Germany.  This is where our barium carbonate is manufactured. This facility is the largest producer of barium carbonate outside of China, and is advertised by Kandelium as the “most energy efficient and environmentally friendly factory of its kind in the world”.  But Kandelium doesn’t mine the barite it uses to produce our barium carbonate.  Instead, they buy this raw material on the global market.  Because the raw material used to produce barium is mined in one country, shipped to another country for refinement, and then sent to a North American distributor, before finally making its way to our ceramics studio, its production and distribution contain many issues of ecology and sustainability.  

Kandelium currently sources its’ barite from mining companies located in both China and Bulgaria.  In working to trace our barium carbonate back to a specific place, we chose to focus our research on Bulgaria but It’s safe to say that barium carbonate we use in the studio originates at multiple mine sites in both Bulgaria and China and is mixed together as it moves through the global network of refinement and distribution.   

In Bulgaria the largest barite producer is a mining conglomerate called the RUA group, whose headquarters are located in the capitol of Sofia.  The corporate website for the RUA group shows extensive images and information about the process of mining and refining barite.  The barite RUA produces, comes from open pit or surface mines in the form of an ore rich in both barite and Iron.  The barite and iron are separated from the ore using a multi part process, before the barite is then refined further into drilling and chemical grades.  The iron produced through this process is used in the production of steel.  While mining in Bulgaria includes government oversight and a permitting process stipulating adherence to environmental and worker safety guidelines, multiple watchdog organizations have described the enforcement of these environmental regulations in Bulgaria as highly inconsistent, and subject to government corruption. 

The RUA website doesn’t list specific mine locations, but research on Bulgarian barite mining quickly leads to Kremikowzi, an industrial district to the North of the capitol of Sofia.  At the core of the Kremikovtski industrial area is a massive steel plant – one of the largest industrial enterprises anywhere in the Balkans – and also, a gaping hole in the ground, known simply as the Kremikovski pit.  While the Kremikovtski pit mine was decommissioned in the 1990’s, it was an active source of iron and barite for decades.  This open pit mine represents a void from which millions of tons of ore have been removed and then transformed into the materials that feed the insatiable appetite of global capitalism.  

The mineral rich soil north of the Bulgarian capitol began its life in a matrix of Dolomitic Limestone.  The regions limestones were formed around 237 Million years ago, during the middle triassic period.  Then, slowly, these parent limestone became permeated with barite and hematite minerals, through a process called “hydrothermal metasomatic replacement”.  This is a common geologic process in which, over time, one mineral is exchanged for another, like the way wood petrifies as its organic minerals are replaced with silica.  The replacement process is accelerated through the heating of mineral rich ground water by rising pockets of volcanic magma. 

About 4 miles from the Kremikovski pit is a vast “tailings pond”, a kind of storage facility for the byproducts of industrial mining.  An image on google earth of a sunset over this tailings pond  shows a soft mist rising over a picturesque lake, lined with grasses and trees.  Tailings ponds have also been described as “among the largest and most ecologically damaging structures created by humanity”.  There are currently about 30,000 of these tailings ponds throughout the world.   They contain toxic chemicals, and are extremely harmful to aquatic ecosystems. Tailings ponds specific to barite mining often contain arsenic and a range of other heavy metals.  The dams erected to contain mine tailings are both massive and prone to failure, and can unleash apocalyptic floods of toxic sludge.  In 2020 the RUA group applied for a permit to mine iron and barium from in and around around this particular tailings pond.  This hauntingly picturesque Bulgarian landscape is one of the places where barium carbonate begins its journey to our studio. 

---