It was the spring of 1987, and a barge called the Mobro 4000 was carrying over 3,000 tons of it—a load that, for various reasons, North Carolina didn't want to take. Thus began one of the biggest garbage sagas in modern history, a picaresque journey of a small boat overflowing with stuff no one wanted, a flotilla of waste, a trashier version of the Flying Dutchman, that ghost ship doomed to never make port.

Suspected of carrying all sorts of hazardous materials, the barge, which set sail from New York City on March 22, 1987, was rejected by over a dozen places. It was, according to one NBC reporter, "chased away by the warplanes of two nations." It was called into service by Johnny Carson, who suggested the Mobro be re-routed to Iran. Dan Rather called it "the most watched load of garbage in the memory of man."

We don't tend to want garbage (that's why it's garbage) but it's more complicated than that. The idea that one man's garbage is another man's treasure animates the booming waste industry, from the professional operations that cart away New York's trash to the mom and pop computer chop shops in places like Guiyu and Accra. Of course most of those businesses are toxic as hell. Some of them have been and may long be convenient fronts for organized crime.

But the redemptive value of trash—its post-recycled worth, its potential use as an energy source—was not exactly on the minds of the angry citizens and lawmakers who stared down the Mobro as it drifted, plodded its way, up and down the Eastern Seaboard that spring and summer, looking for a home.

Because it carried what was to many essentially a pile of nothing, the "gar-barge" was, as it was called, became a magnet for symbols. As it trawled down the coast, the barge was, variously, a clarion call for recycling (before an inevitable backlash), a toxic ticking time-bomb, a signal of a country gone to waste, or the punchline of a joke, in that Barthesque, sad funny way. That's all captured quite well in the first installment of Retro Report, a new documentary series in collaboration with the New York Times.

The idea to send the trash to North Carolina was nothing new. In the preceding years, space in local landfills had become scarce, thanks in part to new environmental policies. When the Mobro debacle began, policy makers and the media warned that the U.S. was running out of room for its trash. In actuality, there were new larger landfills that were located, in theory at least, in less populated places. Getting the trash there required not trucks but barges or trains, which is how much of New York's trash gets to landfills in other states today. (Before and after the Mobro incident, landfills in North Carolina accepted trash from New York.)