<!-- Deleted image removed: thumb|right|300 px|The good ship Khian Sea. -->
The Khian Sea waste disposal incident was an incident in maritime waste disposal. The Liberian cargo ship Khian Sea was loaded with 14,000 tons of ash from waste incinerators in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in August 1986. After searching futilely for a place to dump the waste, the ship eventually dumped 4,000 tons near Gonaïves, Haiti in January 1988, and the other 10,000 tons in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean in November 1988. Since then, there have been attempts to take the waste from Haiti to somewhere else. The case contributed to the creation of the Basel Convention about disposal of hazardous waste.
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. Its return to Philadelphia also failed. 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.
Aftermath
In 1993, two owners of Coastal Carrier were convicted of perjury, having ordered the dumping.
Over the years, various attempts to return the ash dumped in Haiti failed. Greenpeace and Haitian environmental groups launched a "Project Return to Sender" to lobby for funds. It remained there until June 2002 when it was moved to Mountain View Reclamation Landfill, in Franklin County, Pennsylvania near Antrim Township, after several government agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, had found the contents to be classified as nonhazardous waste.