In its anhydrous form, it’s also known as borax. Borax refers to a group of minerals, such as decahydrate, pentahydrate, and octahydrate salts, that are closely related but differ in their crystal water content. It’s also known as sodium borate, sodium tetraborate, and disodium tetraborate. Borax is a mineral that is a salt of boric acid that occurs naturally. It’s created by boiling a boric acid and sodium carbonate solution. The physical and chemical properties of borax are extremely similar to those of boric acid.

The loss of hydrated water causes crystalline solid borax to swell at first, but continued heating creates meta-borate and boron trioxide. Borax first became widely used in the late nineteenth century, when Francis Marion Smith’s Pacific Coast Borax Company began to market and popularise a wide range of applications under the 20 Mule Team Borax trademark, named after the method by which borax was originally hauled out of the California and Nevada deserts. In the seventh century AD, borax was discovered in dry lake beds in Tibet and brought to the Arabian Peninsula via the Silk Road. Some of the applications include pesticides, metal soldering, glaze and enamel manufacture, tanning of skins and hides, artificial ageing of wood, as a wood fungal preservative, analytical chemistry as a buffering agent, and pharmaceutical aid as an alkalizer. It is soluble and can be found in a wide range of industrial and household products as a component. It is frequently available in powder or granular form and dissolves in water to generate a basic, aqueous solution. Sodium borate, sodium borate decahydrate, or sodium tetraborate decahydrate are all hydrated salts of boric acid.

Boron borax