not consulted, however; she obtained a temporary restraining order that forced the waste to stay at sea. The Mobro and its decaying cargo stayed off the shores of Brooklyn until July, when the vessel was granted a federal anchorage in New Jersey. The court hearings ran until October, when it was agreed that the cargo should be incinerated in Brooklyn. The 430 tons of ash that remained from this process was added to the landfill in Islip. Legacy At the time, the Mobro 4000 incident was widely cited by environmentalists and the media as emblematic of the solid-waste disposal crisis in the United States due to a shortage of landfill space: almost 3,000 municipal landfills had closed between 1982 and 1987. It triggered much national public discussion about waste disposal, and may have been a factor in increased recycling rates in the late 1980s and after. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Mobro 4000 incident was caused by a combination of poor decision making by local Islip public officials and short-term difficulties triggered by changing environmental regulations. In popular culture A commemorative T-shirt was produced with the wording "L.I. Garbage Barge - World Tour '87" surrounding a cartoon image of the scow. The backstory of the garbage ball in the 1999 Futurama episode "A Big Piece of Garbage", draws directly from this event. Singer Sally Timms included a song about the incident, "Junk Barge", written by Dave Trumfio, in her 1995 album To the Land of Milk and Honey. A children's book about the incident, Here Comes the Garbage Barge, by Jonah Winter, was published in 2010. Another, All That Trash: The Story of the 1987 Garbage Barge and Our Problem with Stuff, by Meghan McCarthy, was published in 2018. In Tully, character Marlo compares her prepartum body to the Mobro 4000. In Don DeLillo's Underworld, protagonist Nick Shay and his coworkers at his Waste Management Company make frequent allusions to the Mobro 4000. In season three of the TV series Wiseguy (1989), there is an episode titled "Battle Of The Barge" where a waste disposal company has a similar problem with being unable to unload a garbage barge. The movie Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) opens with Andie MacDowell's character in the middle of a psychotherapeutic session, mentioning the Mobro 4000 incident as a source of her anxiety. References Brower, Michael, and Warren Leon. 1999. The consumer's