In 1987, a barge loaded with three thousand tons of New York garbage set out for a landfill and couldn't find anywhere to dump it — rejected by state after state and country after country, it wandered six thousand miles and was gone five months before slinking home with its cargo

In 1987, a barge loaded with three thousand tons of New York garbage set out for a landfill and couldn't find anywhere to dump it — rejected by state after state and country after country, it wandered six thousand miles and was gone five months before slinking home with its cargo

For five months in 1987, the most closely watched vessel in the western hemisphere was a flat steel box piled with nappies, tyres and mouldering cardboard. One television reporter claimed at the time that warplanes from two countries had chased it off, a line preserved decades later in Vice’s account of the saga. Sightseers still hired boats just to go and look at it. Nobody would take its cargo, and nobody could quite explain why. The vessel wa…