Magnesium Chloride is used for low-temperature de-icing of highways, sidewalks, and parking lots. When highways are treacherous due to icy conditions, magnesium chloride helps to prevent the ice bond, allowing snow plows to clear the roads more efficiently.
Magnesium chloride is used in three ways for pavement ice control: Anti-icing, when maintenance professionals spread it onto roads before a snow storm to prevent snow from sticking and ice from forming; prewetting, which means a liquid formulation of magnesium chloride is sprayed directly onto salt as it is being spread onto roadway pavement, wetting the salt so that it sticks to the road; and pretreating, when magnesium chloride and salt are mixed together before they are loaded onto trucks and spread onto paved roads. Calcium Chloride damages concrete twice as fast as magnesium chloride.
Nutrition and medicine.Magnesium chloride is used in nutraceutical and pharmaceutical preparations.Magnesium chloride is an important coagulant used in the preparation of tofu from soy milk. In Japan it is sold as nigari(にがり, derived from the Japanese word for "bitter"), a white powder produced from seawater after the sodium chloride has been removed, and the water evaporated. In China, it is called lushui. Nigari or lushui consists mostly of magnesium chloride, with some magnesium sulfate and other trace elements. It is also an ingredient in baby formula milk.
