On August 31, 1986, the cargo barge

Barge

A barge is a flat-bottomed boat, built mainly for river and canal transport of heavy goods. Some barges are not self-propelled and need to be towed by tugboats or pushed by towboats...

 Khian Sea, registered in Liberia

Liberia

Liberia , officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Sierra Leone on the west, Guinea on the north and Côte d'Ivoire on the east. Liberia's coastline is composed of mostly mangrove forests while the more sparsely populated inland consists of forests that open...

, was loaded with more than 14,000 tons of toxic ash from waste incinerators in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Philadelphia County, with which it is coterminous. The city is located in the Northeastern United States along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States,...

. The city had previously sent the waste to New Jersey

New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...

, but that state refused to accept any more after 1984.

The companies handling the waste (Joseph Paolino and Sons, Amalgamated Shipping and Coastal Carrier) intended to dump the ash onto a man-made island in the Bahamas. However, the Bahamian government turned the barge away, and Philadelphia withheld payment to the companies because the waste was not disposed of.

Over the next 16 months, Khian Sea searched all over the Atlantic for a place to dump its cargo. Dominican Republic

Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic is a nation on the island of La Hispaniola, part of the Greater Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean region. The western third of the island is occupied by the nation of Haiti, making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands that are shared by two countries...

, Honduras

Honduras

Honduras is a republic in Central America. It was previously known as Spanish Honduras to differentiate it from British Honduras, which became the modern-day state of Belize...

, Panama

Panama

Panama , officially the Republic of Panama , is the southernmost country of Central America. Situated on the isthmus connecting North and South America, it is bordered by Costa Rica to the northwest, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. The...

, Bermuda

Bermuda

Bermuda is a British overseas territory in the North Atlantic Ocean. Located off the east coast of the United States, its nearest landmass is Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, about to the west-northwest. It is about south of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and northeast of Miami, Florida...

, Guinea Bissau and the Dutch Antilles refused. Return to Philadelphia failed as well. In January 1988, the crew finally dumped 4,000 tons of the waste near Gonaïves

Gonaïves

Gonaïves is a city in northern Haiti, the capital of the Artibonite Department. It has a population of about 104,825 people . The city's name derives from the original Amerindian name of Gonaibo. It is also known as Haïti's "independence city"...

 in Haiti

Haiti

Haiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island...

 as "topsoil fertilizer

Fertilizer

Fertilizer is any organic or inorganic material of natural or synthetic origin that is added to a soil to supply one or more plant nutrients essential to the growth of plants. A recent assessment found that about 40 to 60% of crop yields are attributable to commercial fertilizer use...

" (when it was too poisonous to be used that way). When Greenpeace

Greenpeace

Greenpeace is a non-governmental environmental organization with offices in over forty countries and with an international coordinating body in Amsterdam, The Netherlands...

 warned the Haitian government of the true nature of the waste, Haitian commerce minister ordered the crew to reload the ash but the ship slipped away. The Haitian government banned all waste imports. Local clean up crews later buried some of the waste in a bunker inland.

Next the crew of Khian Sea tried to unload the rest of the cargo in Senegal

Senegal

Senegal , officially the Republic of Senegal , is a country in western Africa. It owes its name to the Sénégal River that borders it to the east and north...

, Morocco

Morocco

Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...

, Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....

, Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Known until 1972 as Ceylon , Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the...

 and Singapore

Singapore

Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...

. After repairs in Yugoslavia, the ship's name changed to Felicia, registered in Honduras. Later it was renamed Pelicano. Changes failed to hide the ship's original identity.

The rest of the ash disappeared en route from Singapore to Sri Lanka in November 1988. The crew had no comment but eventually the ship's captain admitted that they had dumped the remaining waste - more than 10,000 tons - into the Atlantic and Indian Ocean

Indian Ocean

The Indian Ocean is the third largest of the world's oceanic divisions, covering approximately 20% of the water on the Earth's surface. It is bounded on the north by the Indian Subcontinent and Arabian Peninsula ; on the west by eastern Africa; on the east by Indochina, the Sunda Islands, and...

. In 1993, two owners of the Coastal Carrier were charged with perjury

Perjury

Perjury, also known as forswearing, is the willful act of swearing a false oath or affirmation to tell the truth, whether spoken or in writing, concerning matters material to a judicial proceeding. That is, the witness falsely promises to tell the truth about matters which affect the outcome of the...

, accused of ordering the dumping.

Over the years, various attempts to return the ash dumped in Haiti failed.

In 1997, New York City Trade Waste Commission investigated Eastern Environmental Services whose owner was part of Joseph Paolino and Sons. They agreed to give the company a license to operate in New York City in condition that it would contribute to the cleanup in Haiti. EES agreed to take the waste back. Greenpeace

Greenpeace

Greenpeace is a non-governmental environmental organization with offices in over forty countries and with an international coordinating body in Amsterdam, The Netherlands...

 and Haitian environmental groups launched a "Project Return to Sender" to lobby for funds. City of Philadelphia contributed $50,000.

In April 2000, Waste Management Inc. loaded 2,500 tons of ash and contaminated soil to barge Santa Lucia and shipped it to Florida

Florida

Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...

, where the barge was docked in the St. Lucie Canal. There it stayed for two years until in June 2002 when it was moved to Mountain View Reclamation Landfill, in Franklin County, Pennsylvania

Franklin County, Pennsylvania

As of the census of 2000, there were 129,313 people, 50,633 households, and 36,405 families residing in the county. The population density was 168 people per square mile . There were 53,803 housing units at an average density of 70 per square mile...

 near Antrim Township, after several government agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency

United States Environmental Protection Agency

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is an agency of the federal government of the United States charged with protecting human health and the environment, by writing and enforcing regulations based on laws passed by Congress...

, had found the contents to be nonhazardous.

The case contributed to the creation of the Basel Convention

Basel Convention

The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, usually known simply as the Basel Convention, is an international treaty that was designed to reduce the movements of hazardous waste between nations, and specifically to prevent transfer of...

about disposal of hazardous waste.