A Long Haul To The Trash Dump

July 16 -- After a 16-year odyssey, a famous world-traveler has finally returned to the United States: 2,500 tons of incinerated garbage that could not find a home.

The garbage has been in the headlines since 1986. A prolonged sanitation strike left the city of Philadelphia without a local landfill to dump its trash. So the city looked elsewhere.

"Sixteen years ago it was put on a ship and sent to sea," said Charles Rice, Municipal Inspector for the city of Philadelphia. "And it seemed like nobody really cared what happened to it."

What happened? No other country would accept the trash - not the Bahamas, Bermuda, Honduras or the Dominican Republic. Senegal, Cape Verde, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Philippines also banned the barge.

"It went through a whole series of travel and tribulation, I suppose," said Judy Archibald of Waste Management, which operates landfills around the United States.

At one point the ship's frustrated captain dumped most of the trash into the ocean; all except for 4,000 tons that was re-christened as "fertilizer" and delivered to unsuspecting officials in Haiti.

"There was a high level of deceit on the US side when the ship arrived in Haiti," said Ann Leonard, ______ of the Global Anti-Incinerator Alliance (GAIA). GAIA is an international alliance of non-governmental organizations concerned with waste disposal practices.

After 12 years of worldwide protests, the mountain of trash finally was shipped back to the United States.

"It was the right thing for them to do to bring that back. It is the closing of the chapter it is a victory for international environmental justice that's taken a fifteen year struggle to accomplish," said Leonard.

"The federal government actually paid to have what was left on the beach in Haiti scooped up, put on another barge and taken to the state of Florida," said Dennis Buterbaugh of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

But Florida didn't want it either. So where did it go?