The Garbage Barge That Helped Fuel a Movement | Full Report

(conveyor belt clatters) - Today, recycling is practically second nature, separating plastics from paper is routine.

But it wasn't always this way.

- Recycling on a mass scale can be traced back to the 1980s when it was fueled by growing public awareness and a story about a barge filled with New York trash that got turned away at every port.

- No one we know is particularly fond of taking out the garbage, how about the prospect of not being able to get rid of it at all?

- [Celeste] In 1986, a once-successful Alabama builder named Lowell Harrelson was headed for bankruptcy when he heard about an opportunity 1200 miles away in Islip, New York.

(engine rumbles) Islip's landfill was nearly full and town officials were desperately looking for a new way to get rid of their trash.

- They seemed like they were willing to cooperate and we agreed to make a test run, one trial run to see if my grand idea was really workable.

- [Celeste] Harrelson's grand idea was simple: to ship Islip's garbage by barge to landfills in the South.

But he needed help from his man, Tommy Gesuale, owner of the only private dock in New York City licensed to barge garbage.

- They had no one who knew anything about barging in garbage.

So they come to me and they asked me, "Could I barge garbage for 'em?"

- [Celeste] Gesuale also lined up investors, chief among them, the mafia captain Salvatore Avellino.

With $300,000 backing his plan, Harrelson just needed a couple of boats.

- I had friends in Louisiana in the maritime business, contacted them and was able to lease me a tugboat with a big barge, the Mobro.

- [Celeste] The Mobro left port in March of 1987, just after Harrelson found a landfill in North Carolina that seemed willing to accept its cargo.

Like a magnet for refuse, the barge by now had collected over six million pounds of trash from all over Long Island and New York City.

- Everybody's garbage, everybody had a problem getting rid of their garbage and we were the best game, I guess, at the time.

- At that point in time, everything looked so good.

It was the start of something that I had great hopes for.

- [Celeste] Harrelson predicted profits for disposing of the Mobro's load in the first place and eventually for generating electricity for the methane gas created as the garbage decomposed.

- It was an idea that I had read about, a lot of experts said it's a coming thing, so I just arbitrarily on my own decided to give it a whirl.

- [Celeste] But on April Fool's Day, shortly after the barge docked in North Carolina, a local TV news reporter was at the scene and sparked an outcry.

- The first call we got was, "You're shipping New York City's rats down to us."

And I said, "No."

First, there was no rats on it.

- No one said a barge load of waste, it was a barge load of New York waste!

- [Celeste] As Gesuale remembers it, the pivotal moment came when a state environmental official spotted a bedpan on the barge.

- And they claimed, because of the bedpan, that the barge had hospital waste.

So we were told, "Get it outta there."

- [Celeste] The barge then headed for a landfill in Louisiana.

But when it got there, state officials again barred it from unloading.

- There could be infectious waste from hospitals and there could be hazardous waste.

- A homeless garbage barge.

- [Celeste] That's when the story exploded.

- [Reporter] Dripping brown ooze of possibly infectious material.

- [Reporter] The governor of Louisiana threatened to send out the National Guard if the barge tied up there.

- [Reporter] The vagabond barge has become an international issue.

- The most watched load of garbage in the memory of man.

- Six ports have already refused the refuse.

- [Reporter] The barge has been chased away by the warplanes of two nations and now it's anchored here, five miles off the coast of Key West, Florida.

Still loaded with tons of garbage, still unwanted.

- It was like a brush fire, you know.

It was fun to belittle this barge full of garbage.

- [Johnny] Take your barge up into the Gulf of Persia and there is Iran, dump it right there.

(audience cheers) (audience applauds) - [Celeste] Then, in early May, a team from the EPA inspected the barge in Florida and reported finding trash from hospitals, but nothing that was truly hazardous.

So the Mobro headed back to what seemed like its last best chance, New York.

- From here to there and back again.

- [Celeste] But when it reached New York Harbor, two court orders blocked it from unloading.

- Nobody in an elected position could afford to take this tainted, mythologically frightening load of who knew what into their community.

- We don't know what kind of tropical vermin is in that garbage.

We don't know, it's been sitting in the sun for six weeks.

- [Celeste] Beyond the health worries, the media and experts often portrayed the Mobro as a symbol of a growing national problem, that landfill space was becoming scarce and we were fast approaching a point of crisis.

- [Reporter] We've about run out of places to throw away our throw away.

(trash clatters) - By 1990, according to one federal survey, at least 27 states will be critically short of space to dump garbage.

- [Reporter] When the county board in Sussex last month proposed opening a new garbage collection site the residents were outraged and showed it.

(shouting overlaps) - We are running out of places to dump.

- [Celeste] But then a place to dump the Mobro's load appeared in, of all places, Islip, the same Long Island town that had originally banished the trash.

- We'll take it because we think for a one-time situation we should do it and get it behind us.

- [Celeste] But before Islip could take the Mobro's load, a judge ordered that it all be burned in a Brooklyn incinerator and that's what happened, over five months after the barge left port.

- [Reporter] Harrelson has become the butt of jokes and ridicule and today, in frustration, he gave up.

- The only thing I could do is get out of the way and let it go back to Brooklyn, New York to the incinerator and die its death, be done with it.

(dramatic instrumental music) - In the end, when we unloaded the barge, it was essentially scrap paper, newspaper, cardboard.

I found this pink plastic yo-yo and that wound up in the newspaper.

It made clear how overblown everybody's fear had gotten.

- [Celeste] It also became clear over time that the fears about declining landfill space were overblown too.

What really set off all the panic were new regulations that had forced thousands of small, polluting garbage dumps to close.

- We were saying, oh my God, we went from 10,000 to 5,000, from 5,000 to 2,500 landfills, they're disappearing.

So it really did seem like a crisis, but it wasn't because as the smaller open dumps were appropriately closing for environmental reasons, larger, regional landfills existed and were being built.

- [Celeste] But the attention given to garbage paid off on another front.

A month before the trash was burned, Greenpeace activists hung a banner: "Next time, try recycling."

Until the mid-'80s the amount Americans had recycled had climbed slowly.

Then, with rising public awareness, in part because of the Mobro, it shot upward, more than tripling in the years since.

- I think that the whole experience was extremely useful in getting people to say, "Oh, I actually have to worry about what happens "to the trash after I put it out the back door?

"Somebody's gonna do something with it?

"Or fail to do something with it?"

- [Celeste] Over time, as Americans recycled more of their waste, about 68 million tons today, much of that recycling was exported to China for processing, but that changed in 2018.

- [Reporter] China, the world's largest buyer of these goods is making drastic changes to what it will accept.

- [Reporter] It's a decision that's creating new problems here at home.

- When material like this, like all this paper, can't get recycled fast enough, it could end up going to a landfill instead.

- [Reporter] Facing a volatile global market, communities are grappling with how to handle the new realities of recycling.

- Say goodbye to recycling if you live in the city of Deltona.

With rising costs of recycling, the city decided to suspend its recycling program.

- [Celeste] Some experts say they hope this shake up in the recycling business serves as a wake-up call about America's consumption habits, just like the Mobro did.

- Our waste is gonna wind up some place.

Look at what you use.

There's a lot of opportunity to reduce the amount of waste that we produce at the beginning.

- [Celeste] A growing movement aimed to do just that.

- [Reporter] Spend the day with Catherine Kellogg and you'll see a shopping spree free of waste.

- [Celeste] Setting its sights beyond recycling, it hopes to fundamentally change how Americans think about waste.

- [Reporter] The move towards zero waste is catching on.

- [Reporter] The movement is not new, but has gained momentum through social media and images like this.

It's two years worth of trash.

- [Celeste] Cities like San Francisco are trying to send as little waste to landfills as possible.

Other cities have taken aim at plastic straws or banned styrofoam.

- We definitely say no to styrofoam.

(crowd cheers) (crowd applauds) - [Celeste] As for Lowell Harrelson, the Mobro debacle nearly ruined him and in 2001, his reputation took another hit when he was sentenced to five months in prison for evading taxes and lying to a grand jury.

But in hindsight, Harrelson's plan to make electricity from garbage looks downright visionary.

- I think that he was actually trying to develop a model that could be replicated, a commercial model that was frankly, I think, ahead of its time.

- [Celeste] Today, over 600 landfill gas projects generate energy nationwide.

In 2018, more than 16 billion kilowatt hours of electricity were produced.

- Oh, I do sometimes read about the scale of methane usage today and my first reaction is not one of remorse.

I wish I could've been in it, obviously, but my reaction is more like, wow, I really underestimated that opportunity.

It was far greater than I had pictured it to be at the time.

- [Celeste] At age 85, Harrelson's ambition shows no signs of fading.

He plans to move to Bolivia, where he hopes to mine and ship iron ore on barges like this one, 15 times larger than the one he made famous in 1987.

- Hopefully I won't have another Mobro experience.