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By Jim Hook, Chambersburg Public Opinion

GREENCASTLE, Pennsylvania, 26 June 2002 -- The message "Pennsylvania -- America Dumps Here" almost lifted off the ash-colored cake that Green Party gubernatorial candidate Michael Morrill had baked for the welcome home party.

He quickly smoothed the sheet of plastic wrap back onto the cake before posing with it.

"Why do we have to take in everyone's trash?" Morrill asked. "There is no political willpower here."

Morrill and Vicki Smedley, Green Party candidate for lieutenant governor, used the return of Philadelphia incinerator ash to Pennsylvania as the occasion to discuss the state's management of landfills and incinerators. They spoke to three reporters and a local Green Party member under a sweltering sun in the parking lot of the Antrim Township Municipal Building. "We are not here today to protest the return of this waste," Smedley said. "It is and always has been a Philadelphia problem and should have been returned long ago. This trash is Pennsylvania's responsibility."

The trash, incinerated in Philadelphia in 1986, spent two years on a ship searching for country to accept it, 12 years on a Haitian beach and two years on a barge in a Florida canal. The first load of the 3,000 tons of ash is to be dumped Thursday in Mountain View Reclamation landfill near Upton, according to state and landfill officials.

"We are here today to welcome home the ash that left Philadelphia so long ago," Smedley said. "The citizens of Franklin County will have to bear the legacy of this mess. ... The answer is not to refuse this trash, even if we could. The answer is to stop the wasting of Pennsylvania."

Pennsylvania imported 12 1/2 million tons of trash last year, Morrill said, a ton of trash for every man, woman and child in the state. The state does not test incinerator ash for dioxin, a byproduct of the burning of plastics. Dioxin is "the most toxic chemical known to man," Smedley said.

Expanding landfills threaten the quality of life and have a negative impact on a community's economy, Morrill said. Morrill lives in Berks County, which he said "is becoming the trash capital of Pennsylvania." Morrill and Smedley proposed a state waste policy:

Stop issuing permits to build or expand landfills.

Roll back daily dumping at landfills to the amount of trash that Pennsylvanians alone generate. The move would force other states to deal with their own trash exports or import trash from Pennsylvania.

Encourage recycling and conservation by allowing less trash to be dumped. The governor has the power to implement the policy, Morrill said.

The ash from Philadelphia should have been resolved in 1998, Smedley said, but Philadelphia and then-Mayor Ed Rendell refused to pay more than $50,000 to have it transported back to the United States. The ash was on the beach in Haiti for another two years.

Rendell is the Democratic Party candidate for governor.