SEPTIC SCIENCE.

Byline: Karen McCowan The Register-Guard

ORENCO SYSTEMS, INC.

Founded: 1981 Location: Sutherlin Employees: 280 Annual Payroll: $12 million Annual Sales: $50 million worldwide

SUTHERLIN - A 25-year business here has become one of Oregon's fastest-growing companies by pooh-poohing the premise that there are only two ways to deal with residential wastewater.

`The world is recognizing that it's critical to protect groundwater and surface waters, and that's created a booming market for a business like ours, that solves wastewater problems,' said Hal Ball, president and CEO of Orenco Systems, Inc.

For decades, conventional wisdom dictated just two possibilities for disposing of what people flush down their toilets: containing it in on-site septic tanks or piping it miles away to a centralized municipal treatment plant. But Orenco Systems, Inc. is among pioneers of a third way and has sold more than100,000 of its electronically controlled pumps ,textile filtration systems and watertight storage tanks to clients in 41 countries.

Ball's co-founder, Terry Bounds, had become all too familiar with the inadequacies of septic systems while working as a project engineer for Douglas County in the 1970s. The state was cracking down on groundwater pollution from leaking septic tanks and saturated drainfields, forcing counties and cities to declare moratoriums on development.

The historical alternative, gravity sewers and centralized plants, required millions of dollars in infrastructure, however - impractical for small and low-density communities.

"Municipal treatment plants can also leak and overflow, particularly after heavy rains," Orenco spokeswoman Sandra Huffstutter said. "In any given year, nearly a trillion gallons of wastewater escapes untreated into U.S. lakes and rivers ."

Bounds and Ball, a fellow engineer, thought it made more financial and environmental sense to actually treat the waste at the source. They began developing a line of packed bed filters - first sand, later textile - to further treat the liquid effluent that normally leached out into the ground from septic system drainfields.

"It's extremely efficient and self-sustaining," Bounds said.

Their single home systems are extremely compact. A textile filter system requires a "footprint" of just 75 square feet, making it feasible even on small lots.

In the company's decentralized community systems, capable of serving hundreds - even thousands - of homes, only liquids are piped to a neighborhood treatment plant. The smaller infrastructure investment means hook-up fees are only $6,000 to $7,000 per housing unit, versus $20,000 to $30,000 to connect to a conventional gravity wastewater system.

"This middle road, decentralized approach is now serving about 30 percent of the U.S. population," said Bob Rubin, a North Carolina State University professor and six-year visiting scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he has specialized in decentralized wastewater treatment.

Technology such as Orenco's is environmentally friendly on many levels, he said.

"First, it essentially keeps recycling the water in the watershed where it was extracted," he said. "It doesn't require construction of huge conveyances that require a lot of energy. It uses natural systems, on site, to break down waste without adding a lot of chemicals. And it avoids the direct discharge of pollutants into rivers and lakes."

Small and mid-sized communities have been first to embrace the technology, Rubin said. Among them is Elkton, which chose an Orenco system over a conventional wastewater treatment plant in 1989, largely to avoid discharging effluent into the scenic Umpqua River that sweeps past the town.

"Water quality is important because we are becoming more of a tourist-based economy," public works director Gary Trout said. The system is "about as maintenance free as you can get," he said.

Even urban areas are beginning to use the technology, Rubin said.

"The Battery Park Apartments in New York City have an advanced wastewater system in their basement," he said. "They treat the water on site, then pump it back through the building to flush toilets. Any excess water is used for heating boilers in the winter and for irrigation and evaporative cooling in the summer."

Orenco is known in the industry for its "really high quality products" and for something no one else offers, Rubin said: A management system to help customers use the technology.

The company's systems start with watertight, fiberglass tanks manufactured at their Sutherlin production facility. The finished products look a little like green submarines. Once installed, the only thing that remains above ground is their hatch-like lids, which reduce maintenance and repair costs by eliminating the need to dig up buried components.

Once waste enters the tank, it separates into what Huffstutter describes as "your floating scum, your sludge which settles to the bottom, and a middle, clear zone."

"The settling process is so important," Huffstutter said. "A lot of good stuff happens in there."

The clear layer is pumped out and repeatedly filtered until it emerges looking - and smelling - like water.

"It's so clean, it's approved for irrigation in parks, golf courses, even hay fields, where further treatment takes place naturally through plant uptake of phosphorus and nitrates," she said.

Back in the tank, settling sludge is digested by microorganisms, decomposing in a process as natural as that of a compost pile.

Demand for Orenco products has helped the company supplant the Murphy Plywood mill, which was destroyed in a July 2005 fire, as Sutherlin's top employer.

Entry-level assembly, fabrication and injection-molding employees start at $9.50 an hour plus benefits that include profit-sharing.

But Orenco also employs dozens of highly educated workers, including a variety of electrical, civil, biological and mechanical engineers.

Orenco sales increased more than 20 percent in 2005, to nearly $50 million , and the company expects to post a similar increase this year, Ball said.

Its annual payroll of $12 million translates into a local economic impact of at least $24 million, according to Helga Conrad, director of the Umpqua Economic Development Partnership.

The company has no ties to a former farming community of the same name near Hillsboro - although the founders chose the name after spotting it in a Portland telephone directory.

"We thought it sounded like it was short for Oregon Environmental Company," Bounds said.

The burgeoning company intends to keep its corporate headquarters here, said Ball's son Jeff, vice president for marketing and sales.

"But we're looking into sites for a second manufacturing plant somewhere in the Southeast, because of rising shipping costs for our large components," he said.

Among smaller products developed and manufactured at their Sutherlin plant are control panels for Orenco's compact, on-site pumping and filtration systems, said Jeff's brother, Eric, vice president for product development.

They also produce remote telemetry equipment, even for single residential customers, so service technicians can monitor and troubleshoot underground equipment by accessing a web site from their computers.

"No other company in the world is doing everything we do in terms of a complete, turn-key system," Ball said.