space Press Releases, News Stories

By Marego Athans, The Baltimore Sun

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania, 26 June 2002 -- Remnants of Phila. trash returning after 16 years

It has traveled the world, posed for pictures and earned its own link on two state government Web sites. Documentaries have been made about this pile of ash, the most famous trash that ever existed.

This week, 2,500 tons of incinerated Philadelphia trash returns home to a Pennsylvania landfill after a 16-year odyssey. The globe-trotting trash has been turned away at port after port from the Caribbean to Asia, dumped and left on a Haitian beach for 12 years, then abandoned on a rusty barge in Florida for two.

With much fanfare, the ash is being trucked to Miami, loaded onto trains, hauled by rail to Hagerstown - then trucked to Franklin County, Pa., where it is expected to start arriving tomorrow.

"Even if this kind of ash is transported every day, this is ash with a history, ash with a visa," said Dennis Buterbaugh, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. "We think it's only proper that it's coming back here where it originated. We feel that if you make it, you should have to deal with it."

Philadelphia didn't feel that way in 1986, the year the ash - originally nearly 15,000 tons - set off aboard a 466-foot Liberian barge named the Khian Sea.

The city had its share of problems in those days, A year earlier, police had gained international notoriety by bombing a house inhabited by the black separatist group MOVE, killing 11 people and destroying 61 houses in the resulting fire.

In 1986, the crisis besetting the city was more mundane - transit and municipal workers went on strike. Trash went uncollected, and incinerated ash piled up.

The state had little available landfill space, and other states refused to accept it. So the city hired a hauler to carry the ash to a manmade island in the Bahamas - simple enough, except the Bahamian government turned the barge away before it arrived.

The barge was similarly rejected by Puerto Rico, Bermuda, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guinea-Bissau and the Netherlands Antilles before its operators landed a contract in Haiti to accept the cargo, which was no longer called "incinerator ash" but "topsoil fertilizer."

After Greenpeace and other activists protested, the Haitian government ordered the Khian Sea to pick up its ash and leave - which it did with the bulk of its cargo. But it left 4,000 tons of ash on a Haitian beach.

The hapless barge sailed on to Senegal, Cape Verde, then Yugoslavia for repairs, from which it emerged as a Honduran ship, the Felicia. On it sailed, to Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Philippines - and was turned away everywhere it sought harbor.

In November 1988, the ship, by then renamed the Pelicano, arrived in Singapore without its burdensome cargo. The captain later admitted in federal court that he had dumped the 10,855 tons that remained aboard into the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Two executives of an Annapolis-based company were accused of ordering the dumping and convicted of perjury.

The ash that was left behind in Haiti - 2,500 tons of it, anyway - was finally shipped to Florida in 2000 after the Haitian government, the U.S. government and a waste disposal company struck a deal to have it removed.

Despite being repulsed worldwide, the ash, which has been tested and retested more than the average elementary school pupil, is not hazardous or toxic, environmental officials say. It's the same incinerator ash dumped in municipal landfills around the country every day.

(Greenpeace tested the ash in 1987 when it was first dumped in Haiti and found some of the metals at higher-than-acceptable levels for a municipal landfill, but the group has done no testing since that time.)

What made the ash so unpopular around the world, said Buterbaugh, is where it came from. "This was waste from America, and what was America doing now, exporting its trash?" he said.

Whatever the reason, the bad rap stuck, and no one in the United States wanted the ash either. The Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and several states refused it - Georgia's agricultural commissioner worried publicly that "hog cholera in Haiti" might have infected the ash - so it sat on its new home in Florida, a barge called the Santa Lucia, for two years.

The Santa Lucia and its cargo seemed to enjoy life on the St. Lucie Canal, 25 miles north of Palm Beach. Ten-foot-tall pine trees grew from the ash heap, and dandelions, weeds and grass sprouted on it.

Florida officials, however, wanted the ash out of their state and finally struck a deal with Pennsylvania and Waste Management to move it to the company's Mountain View Reclamation Landfill, in Franklin County near Hagerstown, about 120 miles west of where the waste was produced. Florida will foot the $615,000 bill for the trip and try to recoup costs later from responsible parties.

"It went through two hurricane seasons, and we didn't want to dodge a bullet for a third," said Willie Puz, spokesman for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, noting that the states of Florida and Pennsylvania and Waste Management are living up to their environmental responsibilities.

"It's a win-win for everybody," he said.

Well, not everybody. Robert Whitmore is chairman of the board of supervisors in Antrim Township, population 12,500 and growing, where part of the landfill is located. After just about everyone in the world has rejected this ash, his town of dairy farms and professionals seeking the quiet life has to live with it in the back yard.

"Aren't we lucky?" he said. "It feels like we've been dumped on."

For Whitmore, the famous ash is just the latest insult. Pennsylvania is now importing other states' trash. Numerous landfills have opened up in the 16 years since the Philadelphia ash began its wanderings, and last year the state imported 12.4 million tons of trash, mostly from New Jersey and New York.

For most of the world, however, the ash story nears a happy end, with every last ounce expected to be buried by mid-July.

Then again, anything could happen with this ash, said Lisa Finaldi, toxics campaign coordinator for Greenpeace, which would prefer to see the ash dumped in a hazardous waste landfill. But the group isn't fighting the current disposal plan because, she said, the ash needs to be put to rest.

Former officials at Greenpeace, people who worked on the ash saga in the early years, have told her, "'Even when we thought we were 24 hours away from it having a final home, something happened.' They said, 'Don't count your chickens until it's real.'

"No one would have ever believed that this could have gone on for so long."

Copyright 2002 The Baltimore Sun Company All Rights Reserved