The Mobro 4000

The Most Watched Load of Garbage in the Memory of Man

In the spring of 1987, a barge called the Mobro 4000 was carrying over three thousand tons of trash around the East Coast of the US. It covered about six thousand miles, and it became one of the biggest garbage sagas in modern history.
There was an excess of trash in New York City that needed to go to any available landfill. Salvatore Avellino, a known mob boss of Long-Island's trash hauling, bought the trash and decided to transport it to a landfill in North Carolina. He was willing to bury it on a local landfill and make energy out of it by capturing the methane gas liberated by the trash. However, photographers took pictures of bedpans and other medical waste mixed with the normal trash. That drove state regulators from North Carolina crazy. It was suspected that Avellino let gang members throw medical waste in that trash. After the word got spread out, no community was willing to take it, even though there was enough space for the tremendous amount of trash that the "gar-barge" was carrying.  

The barge started its journey in New York City. It stopped in states such as New Jersey, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. It also past through the Gulf of Mexico, and it went as South as Belize. Every time it docked, people would see the big amount of trash on the barge, so the news and the TV were all over it. After Avellino's company got bankrupted, the Mobro was abandoned. It came back to New York City, where it got incinerated and buried. The Mobro 4000 saga, drove an important concern over the amount of trash that the country was producing. Environmentalists and other people that worried about it initiated recycling movements in a lot of places, especially in New York City, where all the trash that the barge carried over came from.