Many of the coal slag heaps in northern France’s Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining region have been rehabilitated, drawing visitors to unique cultural and natural attractions.

There are more than 350 slag heaps, sometimes called spoil tips, in Northern France alone, and people have been looking for environmentally friendly uses for what used to be industrial trash.

These 10-year-old vines were named ‘Charbonnay’ as a word marriage between the classic chardonnay grape and ‘charbon,’ which means coal in French. This wine proves even a heap of waste can ...

An avalanche of rain-loosened coal slag cascaded down a Welsh mountainside today, burying a school, ... The slag heap is still creeping, John F. Bradley, a town engineer, reported.

A slag heap rises behind residential buildings in Dobropillia, a town in the Donbas. Ninety percent of the country's coal is believed to be in the Donets coal basin in the Donbas region.

The operator, Merthyr (South Wales) Limited, had proposed to extract the coal from the surface or from the slag heaps – once underground mines – scattered across the moor.