The shuttered Shoosmith Bros.’ landfill off state Route 10 in Chester is generating nearly 400,000 gallons of toxic leachate every week. (Photo courtesy Chesterfield County)
Shoosmith Bros.’ landfill has been stinking up Chester for decades. Now, after its closure and the company’s subsequent bankruptcy, the landfill is threatening to become an environmental disaster for all of Chesterfield County.
The landfill off Iron Bridge Road has been generating nearly 400,000 gallons of toxic leachate each week without a proper on-site treatment system, according to a 2025 letter sent to the company from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.
Leachate is essentially liquid that gets contaminated when water moves through years of buried waste. Landfills are required to put in safety measures, such as heavy liners, to prevent runoff, and the liquid is supposed to get collected and treated according to federal and state law and then sent to the county’s sewer system, where it is further processed.
Between 2019 and 2023, the Chesterfield Department of Utilities discovered the landfill had been discharging “untreated leachate” into the wastewater system and revoked its permit, county officials say. Landfill operators are now trucking the leachate off-site on a regular basis. There have also been reports from the James River Association and the local advocacy group Chesterfield Citizens for Responsible Government of leaking.
“We don’t throw around the word crisis lightly,” says Jamie Brunkow, director of advocacy and river ecology at the James River Association. “There are active seeps happening along some of the berms and along the sides of the landfill. There’s been documented evidence from inspections that this pollution has gotten into ditches and ultimately into Swift Creek. The greater concern is, if we had a significant storm, we could see an event where a lot of the pollution goes into the creek and affects the downstream ecology.”
Jamie Brunkow, director of advocacy and river ecology for the James River Association, says toxic waste from the landfill has been found in nearby Swift Creek. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Making matters worse, Axios Richmond reported in early July that a berm separating the landfill from Swift Creek was built with coal ash, the toxic waste leftover from coal-burning power plants, like Dominion Energy’s former Chesterfield plant.
First opened in 1976, the Shoosmith landfill, situated less than 2 miles south of the Chesterfield County government complex, was acquired by Delaware-based VWS Holdco in 2008. As the landfill approached capacity, it attempted to expand operations into a nearby quarry, but surrounding neighbors opposed the plan. Chesterfield’s Board of Supervisors blocked the expansion effort by denying the company’s land-use application in 2018. As it reached capacity, the landfill stopped accepting waste in 2022 and filed for bankruptcy in June 2025.
“In 2024, Chesterfield revoked a permit for Shoosmith landfill, and the operators subsequently stopped pumping any leachate into the county wastewater system,” explained Natalie Spillman, the county’s director of intergovernmental relations, at a Board of Supervisors meeting on May 27. “Instead, they began hauling leachate by truck to an off-site location for disposal.”
During the meeting, Spillman said the county’s utilities department began observing increasing amounts of “influent ammonia levels” at its Proctors Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant beginning in 2019.
Local advocates have been calling attention to the landfill for years.
“This landfill has been a problem for decades because of its poor management,” says Glen Besa, an environmentalist and former director of the Sierra Club, “so it’s not surprising that we’re in the situation we’re in.”
At that May meeting, Mark Miller, chairman of the Chesterfield Board of Supervisors, said the leaking leachate wasn’t affecting the county’s water supply. “The water is not contaminated,” he said. “They were dumping the leachate into our sewer system.”
So, what’s supposed to happen when a landfill shuts down?
The Shoosmith Bros.’ landfill, off Lewis Road in Chester, closed to the public in 2022. (Photo by Jay Paul)
“Landfills are extremely complex, dynamic systems,” says Jim Christiansen, chief executive officer of Integrity Environmental Solutions, which designs, builds and operates landfills. “There are a number of regulations, federal and state, that are designed to ensure that they are protected. But like any complex system, failures are possible.”
Christiansen says because of that complexity, all kinds of releases from landfills can impact the environment. These include groundwater releases and air emissions.
“In general, air permits, groundwater permits, solid waste landfill permits require you to notify the agency [when toxic chemicals are released]. They have very specific steps that you have to take to address the issue,” he says. “At other times, it’s a little bit more open-ended. But in general, you’re going to be working with a regulatory agency. And in most cases, that’s going to be the state.”
If issues persist over time, Christiansen says, there are federal rules that require companies to prove that they have the financial resources to cover the cost of closing a landfill.
“To maintain and operate ... long term, the general time frame is 30 years after it is closed to deal with any ongoing issues such as groundwater impacts and things like that,” he says. “Those cost estimates are updated every five years or so for inflation.”
However, the owners of the former Shoosmith company didn't set aside enough financial resources to deal with a 30-year closure, or the recent environmental issues.
“It appears Shoosmith had only $19 million in financial assurance, while the long-term cost [of cleanup] may be $173 million,” Sturtevant wrote in a public letter sent to state, county and federal officials on May 26. This means Virginians will likely foot much of the bill.
In late June, the General Assembly allocated $10.6 million in emergency funds to assist with the cleanup as part of the state’s budget bill. And in early July, state officials met with county officials, elected leaders and Shoosmith’s bankruptcy trustee to discuss the next steps. The state’s recent allocation, however, only scratches the surface.
“We are committed to working together to identify additional state funds to apply to remediating needs at the landfill,” Chesterfield Supervisor LeQuan Hylton, who represents the Dale district where the landfill is located, said in a statement.
Treating the leachate on-site, Brunkow says, is the primary objective.
“The goal there is to stop having to haul it to a special treatment place, but to treat it on-site and then to discharge it into the county treatment system,” he says. “That will significantly cut down on costs over time, and that’s just got to be a necessary step to really get the site under control and to manage it appropriately.”
