Khian Sea waste disposal incident

On August 31, 1986, the cargo ship Khian Sea, registered in Liberia, was loaded with more than 14,000 tons of ash from waste incinerators in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The city had previously sent such waste to New Jersey, but that state refused to accept any more after 1984.

The company handling the waste (Joseph Paolino and Sons) subcontracted shipment to Amalgamated Shipping Corp and Coastal Carrier Inc, operators of Khian Sea. The latter intended to dump the ash in the Bahamas. However, the Bahamian government turned the ship 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, Honduras, Panama, Bermuda, 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 in Haiti as "topsoil fertilizer". When Greenpeace informed the Haitian government of the origin of the waste, the Haitian commerce minister ordered the crew to reload the ash but the ship slipped away. The Haitian government banned all waste imports. Local cleanup crews later buried some of the waste in a bunker inland, but the rest remained on the beach.

Next the crew of Khian Sea tried to unload the rest of the cargo in Senegal, Morocco, Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka and Singapore. After repairs in Yugoslavia, the ship's name changed to Felicia, and registered in Honduras. Later it was renamed Pelicano. These changes failed to hide the ship's original identity.

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Wikipedia