The U.S. Has A Landfill Problem

Landfills across the country are leaking toxic leachate into waterways, and when owners go bankrupt or vanish, neighbors and taxpayers are left holding the bill.

Photo by Katie Rodriguez on Unsplash

Lynn Tavenner is a bankruptcy trustee, a court-appointed official who steps in to manage a company’s assets and affairs once it files for bankruptcy.

Right now, she is the closest thing to a regulator that a leaking, 50,000-gallon-a-day toxic waste site in Chesterfield County, Virginia, has left.

In court filings, Tavenner wrote that conditions at the Shoosmith Landfill “literally keep” her “awake most nights.” She called it a potential environmental catastrophe.

Engineers estimate it will cost $173 million and 30 years to close this landfill safely. The bond money set aside to pay for it is $19 million.

But here’s an even bigger problem. While the landfill’s pretreatment system sat broken and Chesterfield County was pulling the discharge permit, the people running the landfill’s parent company sold off two parcels of land worth $25 million and $15 million. April 2024. November 2024. Right in the window between the violations and the bankruptcy filing.

They didn’t fix the leak. They cashed out.

The Shoosmith landfill has been, in the words of one local report, “stinking up Chester for decades,” long before this crisis became a state budget line item.

Neighbors fought and beat a proposal to expand the landfill into an adjacent quarry back in 2018, and a local advocacy group, Chesterfield Citizens for Responsible Government, has spent years documenting leaks alongside the James River Association.

Inspectors have since confirmed active seeps along the landfill’s berms with pollution reaching drainage ditches and Swift Creek itself. And in July, reporting revealed that the berm separating the landfill from the creek was built using coal ash, the toxic byproduct of a nearby former Dominion Energy coal plant, adding another layer of contamination risk residents didn’t sign up for.

This story is sadly not limited to Virginia or Missouri, where we told you in December about Jim Roberts and his family living next to the abandoned Generally Hauling landfill, watching toxic orange goo bubble out of the ground while three levels of government played “agency hot potato.”

And let’s talk about New York, where a new statewide report just documented more than half a billion gallons of landfill leachate flowing into the state’s rivers and lakes every single year.

So, why is no one talking about it on a national level?

What Is Leachate?

Every landfill produces leachate, a toxic liquid created when rain filters through decades of buried garbage, picking up heavy metals, pesticides, industrial solvents, and PFAS along the way.

While a landfill is active and profitable, companies are required to collect it, contain it, and deal with it. That’s the whole point of environmental regulation. You make the mess; you clean it up.

But the moment a landfill stops making money—through closure, bankruptcy, or plain old abandonment—that deal falls apart. The company disappears, gets acquired, or goes bankrupt.

The leachate doesn’t stop accumulating. It keeps accruing, sometimes for decades.

Nearby residents have to deal with the aftermath. The odors, the potential health impacts, and the long-term environmental damage.

Three States, Same Problem

In Missouri, the Generally Hauling landfill has been abandoned since 1993. The state DNR says it’s understaffed and underfunded and can’t act. The EPA says abandoned “Subtitle D” landfills are the state’s job, not theirs. The county says it has no funding or jurisdiction and punts back to the state. Meanwhile, a family live downstream of a spring testing positive for arsenic and PFAS.

In Virginia, Chesterfield County saw this coming. Back in 2023, a full two years before Shoosmith’s owners filed for bankruptcy, the county asked the state to share regulatory authority over the landfill. Virginia’s Attorney General’s office said no.

When the county finally revoked Shoosmith’s discharge permit in 2024, after documented falsified records and illegal dumping of untreated leachate, the landfill’s owner started trucking leachate off-site at a cost of $90,000 a week, a bill that helped push the company into bankruptcy months later.

Virginia has now allocated $10.6 million in emergency funding. That covers monitoring and disposal through roughly mid-2027. The state DEQ is also permitted to spend $3 million from its emergency fund and could collect another $1.6 million in monitoring costs. Nobody has said what happens after that.

In New York, the newly released “Leachate Loophole” report from New York River Watch found that landfills sent more than 532 million gallons of leachate to the state’s sewage treatment plants every year from 2019 to 2023.

The report also found that 45 of the 75 landfills responsible for it are already inactive or abandoned. These sites are already leaking and routed straight into rivers that supply drinking water to nearly two million New Yorkers.

How is this situation okay? The public pays, the water suffers, and the company that made the money is nowhere to be found.

If you want to see what “solved” looks like under this system, take a walk through Croton Point Park on the Hudson River. It’s got picnic areas, hiking trails, and sweeping water views. It’s also a capped county landfill that took in municipal and industrial waste, including hazardous material, from the 1920s through the 1980s.

When it closed in 1986, regulators did what they thought was the responsible thing. They capped it, installed a leachate collection system, and called it an environmental success story. Grass grew. The park opened. Everybody moved on.

Except the leachate never stopped. Croton Point still generates an estimated 10.9 million gallons of leachate a year, and that’s likely an undercount, given gaps in the data, according to the New York report. It gets piped a few miles to the Ossining sewage treatment plant, which isn’t equipped to remove the industrial chemicals inside it, and then discharged straight into the Hudson River.

The closure plan had systems to keep leachate out of the river, but no plan to actually treat what it was collecting. It just moved the poison a few miles downstream and called it contained. Sounds more like relocation than remediation.

Sometimes enforcement happens… when you sue.

In York County, Pennsylvania, a landfill owned by Republic Services, a company that pulled in about $19 billion in revenue last year, dumped up to 156 million gallons of inadequately treated wastewater into Kreutz Creek, a Susquehanna River tributary.

The company knew its filtration system couldn’t handle it and, according to the court, “dragged its heels” on fixing it for six years.

A federal judge ordered Republic Services to pay $9.2 million in penalties. But notice who brought the case. It was not the state or the EPA, but a citizen-led lawsuit from the Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper Association.

Even when the polluter is a company with the resources to fix its own equipment, it took a nonprofit river advocacy group filing suit to force accountability. And the Susquehanna, remember, is the same river system the New York report flags as a source of drinking water for Baltimore, Philadelphia, and other Pennsylvania communities downstream.

If it takes a lawsuit to hold a $19-billion company accountable, what chance does anyone have against a landfill that’s already bankrupt?

Follow The Owners

Three companies, Waste Connections, Waste Management, and Casella, manage about half of all the leachate generated by New York’s active landfills, according to the New York report. Each pulled in between $1.8 billion and $25.2 billion in revenue last year.

Private ownership is not automatically the villain here, as plenty of municipally owned landfills show up in this same data with the same problems. But what happens when the business stops being profitable?

A company managing billions in revenue can absorb a cleanup cost or fight a lawsuit. A shell entity like VWS Holdco, which owned Shoosmith in Virginia, can simply file Chapter 7 and vanish, leaving a court trustee to lose sleep over what’s left behind.

As landfills increasingly close and consolidate under fewer, larger corporate umbrellas, we should be asking: what happens when the money leaves and the leachate doesn’t? And we should ask that question before the next bankruptcy filing.

What Accountability Looks Like

States are doing their best to find fixes, but it’s a hodgepodge.

Virginia has stepped in as landfill-of-last-resort with its $10.6 million emergency allocation, even though the state denied Chesterfield’s request for shared authority back in 2023. It’s a live test case for what public assumption of an abandoned private liability actually costs, and who ends up paying, especially once that funding runs out in 2027 with no long-term plan yet in place.

New York’s DEC has a proposed rule that would require new leachate treatment standards before landfill liquid ever reaches a sewage plant, which is a real step toward closing the loophole documented in this report. But even that proposal exempts inactive landfills, the exact category responsible for a third of the state’s problem sites. Public comment is open until September 9.

Pennsylvania shows the fallback when regulators don’t act fast enough. Private citizens suing under the Clean Water Act, six years after the violations started.

Missouri, for what it’s worth, tried. State Senator Ben Brown introduced legislation this year, inspired by Jim Roberts’ case, that would have given DNR clear statutory authority to investigate, test, and remediate the state’s 29 abandoned landfills, and redirected tipping-fee revenue specifically toward that cleanup work. It passed the Senate. It never got a vote in the House. Brown says he’s been promised an interim joint committee this summer to keep the conversation going.

None of these fixes offer real solutions. What we need:

• Financial assurance requirements sized to reality. States need to require bonds that reflect real closure and monitoring costs, recalculated regularly, not set once and forgotten.

• Leachate treatment before it reaches a sewage plant for every landfill, active or not. Inactive and abandoned sites can’t be exempted from treatment standards just because the company that made the mess is gone.

• A dedicated fund, paid into by industry, not taxpayers, for orphaned sites. When ownership disappears, someone still has to pay for containment. Right now, that’s falling on state budgets and, ultimately, on the people whose water supply depends on getting this right.

It’s the same excuse in every state: not enough staff, not enough funding, or not our jurisdiction.

The garbage we throw “away” doesn’t really go away. It sits in the ground for decades, and when the companies that buried it stop being around to manage it, the poison becomes a big problem.

We need change. It starts with treating leachate management as a public health obligation that doesn’t expire the moment a company’s balance sheet turns negative.

Take action: New York’s public comment period on proposed leachate treatment regulations is open until September 9. You can write to:

• DEC’s Division of Materials Management, 625 Broadway, Albany, NY, 12233

  or

• SolidWasteRegulations@dec.ny.gov. Include “Comments on Proposed Part 360 Series” in the subject line

If you live near a landfill, active, closed, or somewhere in between, find out who is responsible for what’s underneath it, and ask your state what happens if that owner disappears tomorrow.

The most honest answer right now is: nobody knows. And that’s a problem.

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Do you live near a landfill? Seen similar issues in your backyard? Let us know in the comments below.