By using plants and microbes to clean used household water from washing machines and showers, Bend business LeapFrog Design believes it can solve water conservation issues in areas prone to drought.
From the outside, the LeapFrog Design Estuary system looks like a planter box, but inside it’s cleaning gray water, which is water from sinks, showers and washing machines. The outcome is water that can be reused in irrigation or toilet flushing. It can be part of the sustainability discussion, said Nick Sund, LeapFrog co-founder.
“It’s kind of like permaculture, where it’s all about living lighter on the land,” Sund said. “What we’re doing is compatible. Our solution is a piece of it. The water system and onsite water use is essential to any permaculture framework.”
To help scale and advance its capabilities, the company will use $250,000 from the Oregon Innovation Council and a $139,000 grant to match the company’s U.S. Small Business Innovation Research program grant.
With 87% of Oregon in the abnormally dry or in moderate, severe, or extreme drought conditions, finding creative solutions to water is an important goal for the state, said Kate Sinner, Business Oregon innovation and business resources director.
“We’re eager about LeapFrog,” said Sinner. “We seek to support innovative companies, and clean technology is one of those areas. We feel LeapFrog has the potential for high growth.”
With another grant that it’s received from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, LeapFrog is now lab testing a system that will also treat black water — water from septic tanks. Plants and microbes will be used to clean it to reuse so it doesn’t get used once and then go through an underground leach field.
What the company learns from the lab work will help Ben Toops, a Prineville resident, who will field test the system that LeapFrog develops.
Toops owns a 10-acre home and farm in Prineville that uses well water. During the dry summer months, he sometimes has to be concerned that the well he shares with another farmer/homeowner may run dry.
“Water is sporadic during the summer,” Toops said. “We are in an area that has high fire danger. We want to recycle our water for livestock, agriculture and fire suppression. Our long-term goal for the property is to operate a vacation rental business, so we want to raise our sustainability. It fits with our business plan.”
In tandem with supporting clean technology and water conservation, the state wants to also support regional innovation, not just in the Willamette Valley.
“We’re deliberately trying to support those ecosystems through technology systems,” Sinner said. “It’s part of the bigger plan for the state to support entrepreneurs regionally rather than having resources just in the Eugene, Corvallis and Portland areas. It’s so important to support the early-stage research, that time before the first commercialization without any revenue coming.
“Business Oregon sees this as a place of growth potential with high paying jobs. There’s a real opportunity to support the regional economy.”
It all started in Peru
LeapFrog founders Adam DeHeer and Sund were in Lima, Peru, in 2016 working on a sanitation project funded by an EPA student grant. The project sought to help develop a solution for liquid waste and gray water. In the South American country, household water waste runs directly into the environment untreated.
Fast forward to 2020, just before the pandemic, and the pair had created a modular system using plants to treat household wastewater for reuse by combining the technology of hydroponics and constructed wastelands. The containerized gardens could function as public green space while cleaning wastewater.
Using bacteria and plants creates a symbiotic relationship to treat the gray water, in a system that’s housed in rectangular planter box that could sit on a patio or serve as landscaping.
There are two main components to the system: one is the smart bench, a tank that receives the gray water from the house, and stores the water to be treated. The second component, which looks like a landscaped planter box, is the wetland-inspired, plant-powered reactor, where the beneficial bacteria get to work. Once the gray water passes through the ecological treatment system, the clean water is pumped to a storage tank where it is ready for reuse, Sund said.
“Water and sanitation is a big problem for everyone, everywhere,” Sund said. “Most people in Oregon are concerned about water. The state is listening and investing in companies creating natural-based solutions.”
Grant funding grows
Since the concept grew out of work in Peru, the focus now is to find the municipality, the homeowner or the business that wants to install a system.
“The grant money we got has been instrumental in our ability to move into the U.S. market and grow our company,” DeHeer said. “We’ve been able to develop the product and hire locally. The funding fills in the gaps from other federal sources. We’re a nontraditional company. Private equity firms typically need to see the product in the market turning a profit before they’re interested in investing.”
The state and federal funds allow the company to seek out new grants like the one from the EPA that is enabling them to research how to retrofit the system to septic tanks.
In 2021, the company was a finalist in the early stage Bend Venture Conference hosted by the Economic Development for Central Oregon. The Bend Venture Fund LLC is a private investment vehicle established annually to help finance the most promising business startups emerging from the event each year.
“Entrepreneurs do so much, and we’re there to support them,” said Deanne Buck, EDCO venture catalyst director. “They bring the energy and the spark. There’s synergy in Bend around climate change, and it shows there’s a lot of innovation and thought leadership around climate change.”
Future growth
LeapFrog’s vision for the future is for housing developers to include their systems with new construction, similar to adding solar or energy-efficient appliances, DeHeer said.
The more people learn about the technology, the more accepted it will be. Learning from the fieldwork at the Prineville home of Toops, will become fodder for the future, Sund said. Right now it’s testing and sampling in the lab.
“We are anticipating that we can offer a gray-water product that can be added to a septic system that will be lower in cost than upgrading the septic system,” DeHeer said. “We’re excited about tackling this problem, and we’ll be looking at our Prineville client’s home and the water quality to meet EPA standards for reuse.”
— Suzanne Roig, sroig@bendbulletin.com
