GREENCASTLE, Pa. - Sixteen years after beginning its voyage around the planet, the first pile of unwanted Philadelphia ash got a proper burial yesterday, on a scenic hill with a view of the Tuscarora mountains, alongside smashed boxes of detergent, orange juice containers, blue plastic grocery bags and tires.
At 1:30 p.m., the first truck marked "municipal waste" lumbered up to the Mountain View Reclamation landfill in Franklin County, weighed in its 21-ton cargo, then proceeded up a dirt road past a sedimentation pond before coming to at the edge of a shallow trash pit.
The chains came off, the container tilted and dark rainwater poured out, as if announcing the arrival of the main attraction: an enormous pile of wet, gray-black, clumpy incinerator ash - Philadelphia's garbage from the 1980s. A compactor ran over the heap a few times and soon the ash, spurned by countries from Honduras to Sri Lanka, was mixed in with all the ordinary refuse that probably never saw a foreign shore.
"This won't be treated any differently than any other load of trash," said Lee Zimmerman, a spokesman for the landfill.
Of course, few loads of trash merit a media tent with cookies and soft drinks, set up yesterday a safe distance from the rubbish rotting in the midday sun.
This ash, the first shipment of 2,000 to 3,000 tons expected to arrive from Florida over the next couple of weeks, has achieved international notoriety since it set sail on a barge named the Khian Sea 16 years ago, amid a trash crisis when Philadelphia could find no place to put its refuse and paid a hauler to take it to the Bahamas on a barge.
The barge dumped some of its 15,000 ton load on a beach in Haiti, then roamed the world looking to offload the rest. Ultimately, the barge's captain admitted in court, 10,855 tons were dumped in the Atlantic and Indian oceans.
The ash left in Haiti remained there for a dozen years, then was taken to Florida, where it has sat on a different barge for the past two years.
Recently, the states of Florida and Pennsylvania and the waste disposal company that runs the Greencastle landfill, Waste Management Inc., reached a deal to haul and bury the ash in Pennsylvania, where it was created. The ash is being trucked to Miami, sent by rail to Hagerstown and trucked 12 miles into Pennsylvania.
The hauling and burial of roughly 200 tons a day will continue over the next 10 to 15 weekdays until all the ash is in its final resting place.
"We are glad that waste that was generated by Pennsylvania was disposed of in an environmentally sound way in Pennsylvania," said Dennis Buterbaugh, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. "We feel that's only proper and other states should do the same, take custody of their waste management so to speak."
But some people here wonder why they're taking custody for trash produced 120 miles away - and in a world far away from the pristine cornfields and dairy farms of Franklin County.
Earlier this week, the Green Party candidate for governor, Michael Morrill, took an "ash cake" to the parking lot of town hall in Antrim Township, where part of the landfill is located, to protest the import of trash to Pennsylvania. "Pennsylvania, America Dumps Here," was the message written on the cake.
"Why are we a dump site?" wondered Frank Talhelms of Mercersberg. "And why didn't they keep it in Philadelphia where it originated from?"
Environmental officials in Pennsylvania and Florida say tests show the ash contains no toxins. Still, something doesn't sit right with Judy Pine, a hairdresser at the local Ebony & Ivory Beauty Shop.
"If nobody else would take it, if it's safe, why would it be on a barge for 16 years?" she said.