Virginia Beach’s Ingenious Solution to Its Garbage Problem
Virginia Beach faced a unique challenge that many cities solve with geography: finding a place to put its garbage. Situated on the flat coastal plain of the Chesapeake Bay, the city’s water table lies just six to eight feet below the surface, making traditional landfills impossible. As Charles Kiley, the city’s sanitation engineer in 1971, explained, the city had filled its last dump and faced a landscape devoid of valleys or gullies to fill next.
Enter Roland E. Dorer, a state health official who proposed a radical inversion of the landfill concept: if you cannot dig down, build up. His vision was to take the city’s accumulating garbage and create something Virginia Beach notably lacked—a hill.
Garbage Lasagna, Engineered Layer by Layer
Between 1967 and the early 1970s, what emerged was not a simple dump but a carefully engineered landfill, built with precision and foresight. The garbage was spread in layers 18 inches deep and compacted under tremendous pressure. Each layer was then sealed with six inches of clean soil before the next layer began. This process created a mound composed of hundreds of discrete, entombed cells of trash, each wrapped in its own earthen envelope. The compaction was critical to prevent the mountain from slumping, shifting, or collapsing as the organic waste decomposed and settled over time.
To source the soil for these caps, crews dredged earth from a swampy area adjacent to the landfill site. The dredging left behind a borrow pit that filled with water, forming what is now the 52-acre Lake Trashmore. This lake, stocked with fish and surrounded by a fitness trail, complements the park’s signature hill. In essence, the hill and lake represent two halves of the same earthmoving operation—the hill is the hole inverted.
The Birth of a Landmark
By the time the city ceased dumping in 1971, the landfill contained more than 640,000 tons of municipal garbage. Compacted and layered into a grass-ready landform, the mound rose 60 feet high and stretched over 800 feet long, making it the highest point in Virginia Beach. The park that was built on top opened to the public in the early 1970s and was proudly marketed as the nation’s first landfill park. Today, Mount Trashmore Park spans 165 acres and offers picnic shelters, playgrounds, and kite-flying slopes—all situated atop the city’s own refuse.
The Name That Refused to Die
The iconic name, “Mount Trashmore,” did not originate from city officials. Rather, it began as a resident’s joke, likening the growing trash mound to Mount Rushmore. By 1969, the nickname had taken hold so firmly that the parks commission attempted to replace it with a more dignified name honoring Roland E. Dorer. Though Dorer declined the honor and supported removing the “trash” moniker, the public disagreed. Much like the famous “Boaty McBoatface” incident decades later, citizen sentiment prevailed, and the city officially embraced the name.
Over the past fifty years, Mount Trashmore’s self-deprecating honesty has become its greatest asset. The park is now Virginia Beach’s most popular outdoor space, has inspired sister parks such as Haginodai Park in Japan, and stands as a landmark in the history of waste management. Its success has inspired landfill conversions across the United States, including the much larger Freshkills Park in New York.
The buried garbage beneath occasionally reminds residents of its presence. As decomposing waste produces methane, the mountain is equipped with vents to safely release the gas. This became local legend in 1992 when a radio DJ’s April Fool’s broadcast claimed Mount Trashmore was about to explode, causing panic and emergency calls. In response, the city installed additional venting flagpoles, both as engineering safeguards and visible reassurance for visitors.
The Enduring Legacy of Mount Trashmore
Understanding Mount Trashmore in the context of the late 1960s reveals its groundbreaking nature. At a time when full dumps were typically abandoned and household waste was often openly burned, Virginia Beach was forced to innovate due to its high water table. The city inadvertently created the prototype for modern closed landfills, incorporating capping, contouring, venting, monitoring, and eventual reuse. Importantly, it demonstrated that the public would embrace recreational use of reclaimed landfill sites, provided the engineering was sound and the environment maintained.
The park’s design subtly teaches this lesson through its landscape. Families picnic on the hill while fishing in the adjacent lake—a perfect symbiosis of land and water shaped by human ingenuity. Every foot of the mountain’s height corresponds to a foot removed from the lake’s depth, a literal trade-off of soil from wetland to dry land. Virginia Beach, confronted with 640,000 tons of garbage and no place to hide it, chose transparency: it hid its trash in plain sight, sixty feet high, beneath a name that tells the whole story.
Mount Trashmore’s success is not just engineering but a story of community acceptance and clever urban planning—a testament to what can be achieved when necessity meets creativity.
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