A barge loaded with the incinerator ash left Philadelphia in 1986. It was turned away from a number of Caribbean countries over the next two years before about 4,000 tons of ash were unloaded on a beach in Haiti. Another 10,000 tons were illegally dumped into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Kenny Bruno was working with Greenpeace at the time, and visited Haiti just a few days after the ash was dumped on its shores.

"You could see that it was incinerator ash from a trash incinerator," he says. "And you could also see that the incinerator wasn't working very well because you could actually read advertisements in newspapers from the Philadelphia Daily News and the Philadelphia Inquirer."

Bruno says the ash came out of Philadelphia at a time when the city didn't have enough space to store trash. He adds that incinerator ash is loaded with potentially dangerous heavy metals. Bruno and others spent the 1990s lobbying for the ash to be removed from the beach in Haiti.

Two years ago, the ash was packed up and brought back to the United States in search of a landfill. But since then, it has been sitting on a barge off the southeastern coast of Florida.

Willie Puz is a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. He says it's the ash's unusual history that has had nearby residents concerned.

"Everybody thought it was hazardous and there's a big aura of hazardous ash concerning this barge," says Puz. "But just last weekend, they removed vegetation and they cut down Australian pines in some cases upwards of five inch trunk diameters! So it's healthy enough to grow trees."

Given that the ash originally arrived in Haiti with false documents declaring it to be fertilizer, it's ironic that the barge was covered with plants while in Florida. But Puz says he'd like to avoid exposing the ash to yet another Florida hurricane season.

Sandy Roderick is a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. She says it's only appropriate that the ash is returning to Pennsylvania after all this time.

"Pennsylvania has spent a number of years lobbying for each state to be responsible for their own generation and disposal of waste," says Roderick. "In light of that, it was good practice for us to take and approve this waste that had originally come from Pennsylvania."

The incinerator ash left the state at a time when landfill space was scarce, but in following years, Pennsylvania permitted enough new landfills to earn the state the distinction of being the country's number one importer of trash. Roderick says accepting the ash back into the state is a message the state should be making.

Roderick adds that there's nothing particularly unusual about the ash, but with high concentrations of metals like chromium, nickel, and aluminum, she'd rather not risk contaminating a water supply.

"We sent state DEP people to Florida to take samples," she says. "We analyzed them here, and what we found was what we would typically expect to find in municipal waste incineration ash."

Roderick says concentrations of heavy metals were within acceptable limits for disposal, so the DEP approved plans to bury the ash at a landfill in Franklin County. Waste Management Incorporated operates the facility, located about fifty miles southwest of Harrisburg.

Waste Management assumed some of the responsibility for the ash when it purchased Eastern Environmental Services. That company's CEO Joseph Paolina was one of the original contractors responsible for disposing of the ash.

While the state of Florida is currently assuming the $650,000 costs of shipping the ash back to Pennsylvania, Waste Management is donating the landfill space and labor.

Waste Management spokesperson Judy Archibald says this will be the first time since the ash was generated that it will be properly stored.

"This is a lined landfill," she says. "It has an advanced liner system, and it will be disposed of and covered each day with six inches of cover material. And then eventually the landfill will be capped and secure."

The Mountain View Reclamation Landfill is situated in Antrim and Montgomery Townships. BJ Roberts is a township supervisor and community landfill inspector in Antrim. He says the landfill creates money for the township by providing jobs and trash tipping fees.

"I'm treating it as any other product that comes in," says Roberts. "In fact, sometimes I think that some household products that people throw into their garbage might be worse than this stuff. We're just taking care of something that should have been taken care of a long time ago. We just happen to be the people that are going to do it."

There has been some debate in Antrim over whether the township should accept the ash, but the questions raised have more to do with the ash's journey than its safety.

And according to environmental activist Kenny Bruno, the ash's return to the state of its birth is an appropriate end to the saga.

"The best option would have been that the ash wasn't created in the first place," says Bruno. "But given that it was created, the morally correct thing, the environmentally correct thing, is that it should come back near where it was generated and that the people and authorities that generated the ash in the first place take responsibility for it."

This month, the ash is being taken back off the barge and hauled from Florida to Pennsylvania. By the end of July it should be permanently stored at the Mountain View Reclamation Landfill in Franklin County.

Photos courtesy of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.