Everyone has trash. Trash needs to go somewhere to be thrown away. What if you live on an island and run out of space? Where do you put all the garbage? Apparently, you call the garbage barge and send it away to live somewhere else. Too bad nobody wants the garbage. Readers can follow the long journey of the garbage barge of Long Island as it goes on a quest to get rid of all the garbage.
Winter, J. (2010). Here comes the garbage barge. New York, NY: Schwartz & Wade Books.
Review: School Library Journal
A fictionalized account of real events that occurred in 1987, this story will convince young readers to take their recycling efforts more seriously. When Islip, NY, has nowhere to put 3168 tons of garbage, the town officials decide that shipping them south is the right thing to do, so a tugboat towing a garbage-laden barge takes it to North Carolina. But North Carolina won't allow the vessel to dock. It goes on to New Orleans, but again is denied harbor rights. Then it is on to Mexico, Belize, Texas, Florida, and back to New York. The garbage is ripening all along the way. Now even Islip refuses to take it back. Finally a judge orders Brooklyn to take it and incinerate it, 162 days after the barge started its journey. Islip is ordered to take the remains to their landfill. The illustrations are photographs of objects made from garbage. The people, full of personality and expression, were made from polymer clay, and wire, wood scraps, and leftover materials of all kinds were used for the tugboat and barge. The inside of the paper jacket explains how the art was done. This title should be a part of every elementary school ecology unit.
Bates, I. (2010). Here comes the garbage barge!. School Library Journal, 56(1), 84.
My Impressions: Here Comes the Garbage Barge! is a visual masterpiece. Red Box Studio constructed each 3D-model from real junk and found objects. The feel of the pictures is very gritty and real because they are photographs of actual 3D objects. The effect of the art style on the book is great. Readers see and can almost feel the different textures and elements of each piece. The garbage becomes the character itself throughout the pages of this non-traditional, historical fiction tale. The exaggerated caricatures of each country provides vivid imagery for their culture and lifestyle at the point in history when the garbage barge frequented their shores which provides realistic context for its journey. All the while, the garbage barge slowly chugs along and illustrates how inconvenient waste is to people on the planet.
Library Use: Here Comes the Garbage Barge! could be used in conjunction with an Earth Day initiative done in the library. The book could be read aloud to highlight the amount of waste accumulating and the danger of all of it in our country and on our planet. A library lesson could be used to examine the trend of paper books becoming digital books and the impact that shift and other digital shifts can and are having on the planet and its environment.
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