SIX CONTAINERS of toxic diesel sludge have been found dumped on the side of a road in Co Louth.
Two of the plastic containers were discovered leaking on the former main Dublin to Belfast road near Dunleer early yesterday. The road between the M1 at junction 14 and Mullins Cross was closed for a clean-up operation.
The white plastic cubes contained a byproduct of the diesel-laundering process in which criminals remove the dye from agricultural diesel in order to sell it as road fuel. Each of the containers held 1,000 litres of liquid.
Council sources said the authority had already dealt with 80 such incidents of dumping toxic diesel sludge this year, involving 326 such containers.
The total cost of recovering and treating each container is about €1,000. The product is ultimately sent to Germany for treatment.
Some 808 containers of toxic diesel sludge were recovered by the council last year in 92 dumping incidents. The total cost of the recovery was some €1 million, council sources said.
The local authorities in Louth, Meath, Cavan and Monaghan are evaluating tenders from expert contractors who will be appointed in the coming months to deal with finds of oil-laundering residue.
More than one million litres of oil, including oil seized from unlicensed premises, were seized by Revenue Customs Service last year. Revenue has uncovered six oil laundries to date in 2012. It estimates that had they continued to operate, they would have had the potential to launder about 42 million litres of fuel a year.