A 25-Year History of the Onsite Industry: Where have we been and where should we be going?

The year was 1979, and the new National Small Flows Clearinghouse was being launched. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Engineering Laboratory had just completed a series of about 25, week-long seminars in all ten EPA regions and was working on the now famous "purple book" (EPA, 1980), which would serve as the basis for upgrading onsite waste-water system regulations in most states and a number of countries throughout the world. The seminars had broken EPA technology transfer attendance records in several locations. What could go wrong?