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by Agence France Presse

An environmentalist group said the firm, Formosa Plastics Corp., was now looking to offload the waste in Germany.

Alain Strebelle, under-director for products and waste at the French environment ministry, said a French company, TREDI, that had applied to bring in the waste for disposal had now abandoned the project.

"We sent them a questionnaire asking how the waste would be sorted and stocked pending its disposal and other questions," he told AFP. "They have preferred not to go ahead."

The head of TREDI's disposal plant at St. Vulbas, near the Swiss border, Jean-Loup Queru, confirmed that firm had scrapped its plans, "partly because of the deadlines" imposed by the authorities.

TREDI had filed an initial request to treat around 5,000 tonnes of waste, and a request to dispose of another 5,000 tonnes was expected later.

The grey sludge -- described in customs documents as "construction waste" -- was found in tests in Cambodia to contain high levels of mercury.

Formosa Plastics Corp. sparked riots in Cambodia after it unloaded the shipment at the southern port of Sihanoukville last December.

The waste, which local residents alleged had caused the death of a port worker, was then sent back to Taiwan, where it has been languishing ever since while the company hunts for a way of getting rid of it.

Formosa Plastics said in May that an attempt to send the consignment to Los Angeles had been refused due to what it described as incomplete documents and it was looking for another site overseas to handle the waste.

The consignment that was sent to Cambodia is reported to have been between 2,700 and 3,000 tonnes. French environment ministry watchdogs were curious as to why the import request concerned a higher figure.

Taiwan is not a signatory of the Basel Convention, which aims to prevent illegal dumping of waste in other countries.

A Paris-based environmental group, the National Centre for Independent Information on Waste, said Formosa Plastics had been offering French firms 300 dollars per tonne to handle the sludge.

Formosa Plastics "is now trying to export its waste to Germany," the group said, without details. Germany is one of the most environmentally sensitive countries in Europe, and an ecology party, the Greens, is part of the federal government there.

In France, TREDI would have required authorisation from the environment ministry, environmental controls by customs officials at the port of entry and approval by the local prefect.

Queru said TREDI's Taiwanese subsidiary "is continuing to look for a non-French solution. There are several other possible solutions, although we have not found one for the time being."

TREDI's two-year-old facility at St. Vulbas handles mercury waste under a process called vacuum vaporisation, which it maintains does not release any of the toxic substance into the environment.

Removal of the mercury would leave a non-toxic compound that would have been buried in France.