In March 1987, a barge left Long Island carrying more than 3,100 tons of garbage. It spent the next two months getting turned away by six states, Mexico, and Belize before anyone would let it come home.
The trash belonged to the town of Islip, New York, which was running out of room in its landfill. An entrepreneur named Lowell Harrelson arranged to ship a load of it to Morehead City, North Carolina, where it was supposed to be buried and used to generate methane gas, according to a Vice retrospective on the incident. The garbage itself was purchased from the Islip landfill by Salvatore Avellino, described in that same report as a reputed Long Island trash-hauling boss looking to profit off the deal.
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