Ethylene Oxide and the Sterilization Services of Virginia Plant in Henrico: What Residents Should Know

Sterilization Services of Virginia runs a plant at 5674 Eastport Boulevard in Henrico County, near Richmond International Airport. The plant sterilizes medical equipment using ethylene oxide, often shortened to EtO or EO, and it has operated this way for roughly two decades. The company also runs sterilization plants in Memphis and Atlanta.

In 2022 the EPA's Air Toxics Screening Assessment flagged the Henrico plant as a major contributor to elevated cancer risk in the surrounding area. That drew the attention of residents and of community groups. On March 25, 2026, Virginia Interfaith Power and Light and the Southern Environmental Law Center held a public meeting at the Gravel Hill Community Center in Varina, led by the Rev. Faith Harris, to tell neighbors what the gas is and where it comes from. VPM News reported that many residents had no idea the plant was there or what it emitted until groups began raising the issue.

The company has said its emissions are within legal limits, and Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality says the plant installed new safeguards in October 2025 that substantially reduce its actual emissions. Those points belong in any honest account. They do not resolve the question of what people living nearby were exposed to over the years the plant operated with far looser controls, which is the question a toxic exposure claim asks.

Ethylene oxide is a colorless, odorless gas. Industry uses it to make antifreeze and other chemicals, and hospitals and device makers rely on it to sterilize equipment that cannot survive heat or steam. The medical device trade group AdvaMed says EtO sterilizes more than half of all medical devices used in the United States each year, including pacemakers, heart valves, catheters, syringes, surgical kits, gowns, and ventilators. That is the uncomfortable center of this story. The same gas that makes much of modern medicine possible is the one neighbors are breathing.

There is a connection here to the device coverage on this site. In our Defective Medical Devices practice area we write about implants and machines that failed patients from the inside. Ethylene oxide is the flip side of that world. It is the agent that sterilizes those same devices, and when it escapes a plant into the air, it becomes a hazard to the people who live around the plant rather than the people who receive the device.

In December 2016 the EPA finished a reassessment of ethylene oxide and concluded that the gas is carcinogenic to humans. The agency found the strongest human evidence linking EtO to lymphoid cancers, a group that includes non-Hodgkin lymphoma, myeloma, and lymphocytic leukemia, and to breast cancer in women. The assessment found that the gas is genotoxic, meaning it damages and mutates DNA, which is the mechanism by which it is understood to cause cancer. The 2016 reassessment concluded the gas was far more carcinogenic than the agency had previously estimated. Marissa Land, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, told VPM the updated figure was roughly 60 times the agency's earlier estimate, and said that exposure to even low amounts raises the risk of lymphoid cancers, myeloma, leukemia, and breast cancer.

The EPA did not stop at a general statement about the gas. It modeled the risk around this specific plant. The agency's risk assessment estimated the lifetime cancer risk for residents living nearest the Henrico facility at about 1,000 in a million, which is the same as 1 in 1,000, with the risk declining as distance from the plant increases.

That number needs context to land. Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA generally treats a maximum lifetime cancer risk of 100 in a million, or 1 in 10,000, as the upper edge of what is acceptable, and it aims to protect the greatest number of people to a risk of 1 in a million. An estimate of 1,000 in a million for the nearest residents is about ten times the upper edge of the acceptable range and a thousand times the agency's protective goal. Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality, in its review of air toxics and health risk across the state, ranked the Henrico plant first among all facilities in Virginia on one common risk-screening score.

A risk estimate is not a diagnosis, and it does not mean every neighbor will get sick. It is a population-level number that tells regulators a given level of exposure is too high to leave alone. For a family trying to make sense of a cancer that appeared after years near the plant, the estimate is one piece of the picture, not proof of what caused any one illness. Causation in these cases is its own question, handled by medical and exposure experts, and we come back to it below.

For years the federal limits on ethylene oxide from sterilizer plants lagged behind what the science said about the gas. In 2024 the EPA finally finalized a rule, the National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for ethylene oxide commercial sterilizers, that required most plants to capture and destroy the great majority of their EtO emissions within two to three years. The agency estimated the rule would cut emissions from these plants nationwide by about 90 percent.

That rule has not taken hold here. In July 2025, Sterilization Services of Virginia was one of roughly 40 sterilization facilities granted a two-year presidential exemption from the 2024 standards. Then in March 2026 the EPA, under Administrator Lee Zeldin, proposed repealing the 2024 rule altogether. The agency's legal theory is that the Clean Air Act allowed it only one risk review of the gas, that the review happened in 2006, and that the 2024 rule therefore rested on a review it was not permitted to conduct. The EPA framed the repeal as protecting the supply of sterilized medical devices. The agency held a virtual public hearing on April 1, 2026, and took public comment until May 1, 2026, a deadline that has now passed.

The rollback is being fought. The Southern Environmental Law Center and the Natural Resources Defense Council sued the federal government in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia over the presidential exemptions, on behalf of community groups that include Virginia Interfaith Power and Light. Separately, Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones joined a coalition of state attorneys general opposing the EPA's proposed repeal and, in May 2026, joined a multistate lawsuit challenging the EPA's rollback of emission standards. The device industry, through groups such as AdvaMed, argues that EtO sterilization has been and will continue to be safe and that disruptions could delay patient care. Where all of this ends is not settled.

Regulators are not the only ones who have flagged this plant. On April 9, 2026, the facility notified Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality that a faulty check valve in its ethylene oxide delivery system had released close to 600 pounds of the gas into the air. State reporting described it as roughly a year's worth of permitted emissions escaping in a single day. The DEQ proposed a fine of about 53,600 dollars over the release.

A single malfunction does not define a plant, and the company points to the safeguards it added in late 2025. But an uncontrolled release of this size is a reminder of what sits inside the building and what can leave it when something fails. For residents, the release is also a dated, documented event, the kind of fact that matters when a claim turns on what people were exposed to and when.

This is not a medical malpractice case, and it is worth being clear about the difference. A malpractice claim is about a provider's care of a patient. A toxic exposure claim is about a company releasing a harmful substance into a community and the harm that followed. The defendant is the operator of the plant, not a doctor, and the legal theories run through negligence, nuisance, and related claims rather than the standard of medical care.

What the two kinds of cases share is the hardest element: causation. It is not enough to show that the gas causes cancer and that a person who lived nearby got cancer. The claim has to connect the two, usually through exposure modeling and medical testimony that ties a specific person's illness to the plant's emissions rather than to smoking, genetics, or ordinary bad luck. The cancers most closely associated with ethylene oxide in the scientific record are the lymphoid cancers, meaning non-Hodgkin lymphoma, myeloma, and lymphocytic leukemia, along with breast cancer. A claim is strongest when the diagnosis is one of those, the person lived or worked near the plant for a meaningful period, and the timeline fits.

These cases are not theoretical. In Willowbrook, Illinois, residents sued Sterigenics, a different company that ran a different ethylene oxide sterilization plant. In September 2022 a Cook County jury awarded 363 million dollars to one woman, Sue Kamuda, who developed breast cancer she blamed on the plant's emissions. In January 2023 Sterigenics and its parent company agreed to pay 408 million dollars to resolve more than 870 similar lawsuits. The company denied liability, and the settlement was not an admission that it did anything wrong. That litigation does not decide anything about the Henrico plant, and the facts here are their own. It shows that juries have found these claims credible and that the companies have treated them as serious.

If there is one thing to take away before you finish reading, it is that waiting is the expensive mistake. Virginia generally gives a person two years to bring a personal injury claim, and a wrongful death claim generally runs two years from the date of death. Virginia is also one of the stricter states in the country on when that two-year clock starts. The law generally ties it to when the injury occurred rather than to the day a person first connects an illness to its cause. The exact accrual question in a latent-disease case is fact specific and is something a lawyer has to work through on the records, not something to guess at from the outside.

That combination is exactly why early legal advice matters here more than in an ordinary accident case. The clock can be running before a person realizes a claim exists, and the evidence that these cases depend on does not wait either. Emission records, monitoring data, and the history of what the plant released and when are the backbone of a claim, and they are easier to secure sooner than later. Our article on the statute of limitations for medical malpractice walks through how these deadlines work and why the start date can be the whole case. The safe step is to ask now, while the answer can still help, rather than to assume there is plenty of time and find out otherwise.

Start by writing down the basics while they are clear. Where did you live and for how long, and how close was it to the plant. When were you or your family member diagnosed, and with what. Which doctors and hospitals were involved. If the diagnosis was one of the cancers linked to ethylene oxide, a lymphoid cancer or breast cancer, note that, but do not screen yourself out if it was something else. The point of a review is to sort that out, not to decide it in advance.

Gather what records you can, including the medical records tied to the diagnosis and treatment and any documentation of where you lived and when. You do not need to build the exposure case yourself. The emission data, the EPA and state assessments, and the modeling that connects a plant to a neighborhood are things a firm develops with experts. What you can do is preserve your own history and reach out before a deadline you may not see coming closes the door.

A case review costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Peter Anderson reviews inquiries personally, and the firm reviews cases nationwide with a particular footprint across Virginia, D.C., and Maryland, which puts this Henrico plant squarely in our home region. If you or someone in your family developed cancer after years of living near the Sterilization Services of Virginia plant, a free and confidential review is a way to learn where you stand while the answer can still make a difference.