Take out the trash

The solution seems obvious now, but it took 16 years, over $630,000 and innumerable hours of negotiations to find it. Once politicians and special interests groups accepted the obvious, they got up from the negotiating table, gathered up their trash and took it out back to dump.
It did not look that easy back in 1986. At that time Philadelphia’s landfill, like those in many East Coast states, was out of space. Train cars and barges loaded with trash roamed the country looking for landfill space. Philadelphia’s unwanted household trash which had been reduced to 25,000 tons of ash, was treated like a great-uncle who alienated so many people that even those who only have heard about him avoid him.
The undumped trash ash had about the same effect. In 1987, a city subcontractor found space in the Bahamas, loaded it on a ship and headed to the island only to meet armed Bahamians at the dock, who prohibited the ship from docking.
According to AP wire stories, that was just the beginning of the search for a dump site. Crew members reported being turned away at gunpoint from Bermuda, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guinea-Bissau and the Netherlands Antilles. Environmental groups preceded the ship warning each country that the ash might contain toxic materials.
Federal and state regulators in the United States admit the ash contains toxic metals such as lead and cadmium but report that the levels are so low that similar amounts have been, and continue to be, disposed of regularly (without environmentalists’ protests) at landfills around the country. On New Year’s Eve 1987, the ship anchored off Gonaives, Haiti, where the ash was going to be used as topsoil fertilizer. Under the duress of public protest, those permits were revoked, the unloading stopped and the 10,800 tons which had not been off-loaded were sent back to sea and further rejections.
Finally, the CEOs of the shipping company got fed up and acted like that eccentric uncle. They told the ship’s captain to dump the trash overboard into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Uncle Sam rewarded their pragmatic ingenuity with a jail sentence.
Meanwhile the ash left in Haiti sat on the beach for 12 years – until 2000 – when the Eastern Environmental Services arranged to load it up and take it to Florida. It floated off the Florida coast until the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection decided that since the waste originated in their state, they would dispose of it in one of the many Pennsylvania landfills that had opened since the landfill crisis of 1986.
The soggy ash was loaded into plastic lined bins and hauled back to the state of brotherly love and buried under six inches of dirt at Waste Management’s landfill known locally as ‘Mount Trashmore’. Waste Management employees shrugged off all the fanfare surrounding the dumping of the 16 year old trash as just one more day at the landfill where they bury 1,500 tons of refuse every day. They covered the famous ashes with six inches of dirt.
Maybe someone should put a plaque up on the site denoting the spot as the final resting place of the most traveled, biggest pile of trash that captured the attention of the most environmentalists and politicians around the world for the longest time before it was finally put to rest. After all, who knows what archeologist of the year 3002 will discover and unearth the site, eagerly searching for the great secrets of today’s civilization.
May it rest in peace until then. I doubt that even folks in 3002 will understand the 16-year saga of the Pennsylvania trash that traveled the world before it was buried in the state’s back yard.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)