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| Long Journey of the Khian Sea |
 On September 5, 1986, the Khian Sea, a 466-foot garbage barge owned by Joseph Paolino and Sons, left Philadelphia carrying 14,855 tons of incinerated household garbage - essentially ash.
Philadelphia, short of landfill space, had earlier been sending its incinerated waste to New Jersey but that city now refused additional shipments because of looming space concerns of their own.
The barge was headed for a manmade island in the Bahamas owned by the Amalgamated Shipping Company that had agreed to take the shipment. The Bahamian government heard of the deal while the barge was underway, however, and refused to give permission to dock. The barge then tried to take the ash to Bermuda, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and the Netherlands Anitlles but was rebuffed at every port. Each was suspicious that the contents had to be more than simply garbage and were probably highly toxic.
In 1987, the Khian Sea successfully unloaded 4,000 tons of its cargo onto a beach in Haiti after telling the local government that it was fertilizer. With a slightly smaller cargo of ash, the barge headed east for Africa, trying to unload in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal. All three, fearing toxic content, denied the barge. It kept going, continuing on to Borneo, Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka. All continued to decline the request to unload. At least one, the barge was refused entry to a port at gun point.
The barge was renamed Felicia in an attempt to sneak it into a port. it failed. The barge was sold to a new owner to get into a port. Another failure.
 In its second year of voyaging, the crew decided to simply dump the 10,000 tons of remaining ash into the sea in November of 1988 when no one was around. Arriving in Singapore empty, suspicions were raised and an investigation began. Two executives of the company that owned the barge were sent to prison for the dumping in 1993.
By 1996, environmentalists had succeeded in convincing the United States government that the ash unloaded in Haiti should be cleaned up. The Santa Lucia, a new barge, collected the ash in 2000 and docked in Martin County, Florida. The Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and Broward County in Florida were both contacted to take the ash but both declined, sure it was contaminated.
Glen Henderson, a columnist for the Palm Beach Post, went aboard the barge in 2002 to see the ash for himself. "Squeezing between multitudes of spider webs, I peered down into the ?hold? and couldn?t believe my eyes. Australian pines were everywhere, some as tall as 10 feet. There were dandelions, weeds with small blue-and-yellow blossoms, patches of seemingly manicured grass, and tall brown weeds resting in layers across grayish piles punctuated by pure-white chunks of who-knows-what. And there was a hibiscus plant with pretty pink blooms," he wrote.
The ash was tested by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the city of Philadelphia, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Biosystems. All of them found it non-hazardous. It was finally disposed of at the Mountain View Reclamation landfill in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, a few miles from its starting point 16 years earlier.
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