"Green" builder Glenn Carlson loves Fayette County's steep, forested ridges.

After his river guiding career, he turned to home building. His philosophies regarding mountain life led him to seek ways to build homes with the tiniest footprint possible in The Ledges, his eco-sensitive community near Fayetteville.

Pretty brochures never mention what happens moments after people flush, shower, or brush their teeth. For Carlson, the sewage issue loomed large. To his delight, he found Orenco Systems, an Oregon company whose tagline reads "Changing the way the world does wastewater." Carlson's goals were to keep his trees, preserve the dramatic landscape, and provide reliable sanitation in his rugged setting. Orenco's high tech, compact, highly efficient bio systems were just the trick.

"Orenco systems are very cost effective when you look at them in comparison with huge multimillion-dollar public systems," Carlson says. "Creating infrastructure, huge gravity lines, miles of underground pipes and processing plants-it's not feasible or even desirable in rural West Virginia. With these new systems, it's not necessary."

Not so fast...

Carlson's system impressed Jeff Proctor at Class VI Mountain River, an outdoor vacation company that in 2005 was planning a complex of eight rental cabins in the woods near the rocky rim of the New River Gorge. "We didn't want to kill trees to put in leach lines," Proctor said. "The typical leach field for a septic system is as big as a soccer field. We wanted to preserve our woods."

In the course of installing the state's first commercial Orenco system, Proctor became an expert on the perils of being a sewage system pioneer. The computer monitored bio-sewage system worked perfectly from the day they flipped the switch, but a skeptical health department did not rush to approve it. "There was a learning curve on everyone's part," Proctor says. Despite the fits and starts involved in getting the first project in operation, "it's worked really well," he says. "We're installing another system to support an expansion."

Orenco and similar high tech systems have proven in many cases to out-perform complex, expensive traditional sewage systems, producing clean, safe effluent through micro-processing on-site plants that require minimal land disturbance, but West Virginia laws don't recognize the high tech breakthroughs, and still require traditional sewage processing.

Proctor understands reluctance to accept new technology. "When folks aren't familiar with something, they don't want to be the first to embrace it. If it doesn't work as well as the manufacturer claims, they don't want to be responsible for approving it. It might be simpler, cheaper and more effective, but as far as they're concerned, it's unproven."

'You have to innovate.'

Development of the Hatfield-McCoy trail system in southern West Virginia created a market reason to deal with untreated sewage in old coal mining territory. Thousands of ATV riders from around the country demand civilized services.

Ashland, McDowell County, is a stop on the National Coal Heritage Trail. Scores of visitors come to the once-bustling coal camp where 22 homes remain. Entrepreneur Sharon Walden, proprietor of the Ashland Company Store, is happy that the Ashland ATV Resort, a collection of prefab log cabins built on a strip mine site, made the need for sewage treatment urgent.

This past spring, years of work with Canaan Valley Institute, state agencies, and non-profits culminated in the inauguration of the McDowell Wastewater Coalition's first decentralized community system, at Ashland. After percolating through a series of mountainside filters, outflow goes into a constructed wetland, sparing beautiful, trout-laden Elkhorn Creek which has served as an open sewer for more than a hundred years.

"In a place like McDowell County, you have to do alternative systems," says Karen Robinson, treasurer of the Presbyterian non-profit that in 2003 paid to install the state's first Orenco system for a Head Start program near Welch. "You have to innovate."