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By Oliver Poole, The Daily Telegraph, London

LOS ANGELES, 19 July 2002 -- AFTER a 16-year voyage to at least 14 countries the world's best-travelled rubbish has finally found a home, at a dump barely 100 miles from where it was first incinerated.

Pennsylvania has agreed to put an end to the wanderings of 2,500 tons of ash the state thought it had seen the last of when it was dispatched from Philadelphia in 1986.The city had run out of landfill space and faced bankruptcy.

Officials thought the ash was destined for a dump in the Bahamas owned by the shipping company but the islands' government turned it away, apparently after a tip-off from Greenpeace.

The rubbish rapidly became an international environmental cause celebre as nation after nation refused to take it. Several sent the vessel on its way after confrontations at gunpoint amid rumours that the rubbish was toxic.

Most of the original 15,000-ton cargo was illegally dumped in the Indian Ocean in 1988, which led to the imprisonment of two shipping company officials.

But the final 2,500 tons lay in an uncovered mound on a beach in Haiti, where it had been unloaded a year earlier.

For two years it has been held on a barge off Florida as six American states followed the world's example and refused to take it. But the pile - which now has wild flowers and 10ft trees growing out of it - returns to Pennsylvania next week.

"It shows we take care of our own," said David Hess, the state's environmental protection chief.