One of the biggest landfill sites in Ireland is due to close in the next 12 months, with management planning to grow grass and plant trees on the 236-acre ‘red mud’ pond at the Aughinish Alumina plant.

The environmental lobby group that complained to the European Commission about the toxic dump in Cork Harbour fears the Government is ignoring vast areas of contamination in its long-awaited €40 million clean-up of the site.

The Government has said it has set a two-and-a-half year deadline to complete the clean-up of a toxic dump in Cork Harbour, which contains an estimated 500,000 tonnes of waste.

Work to make one of the country's largest toxic waste dumps safe has begun.

Work will commence shortly to help make safe a toxic dump in Cork harbour.

A local authority is poised to shut down and clean up an unauthorised end-of-life vehicle compound located next to a reservoir which supplies drinking water to 95,000 people, a court heard recently.

The condition of Europe’s soil is under pressure with its deterioration costing the EU up to €38 billion a year, according to a report unveiled in Berlin.

Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have arrived in the Japanese city of Fukushima to observe the massive decontamination effort under way after the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

The clean-up of one of the country’s largest toxic dumps, for which the Government has allocated €40 million, is unlikely to begin until the middle of 2012.