ReWater’s Early Adoption and Activism

The use of greywater was illegal when Stephen Bilson founded ReWater® Systems in Palo Alto in 1990 during one of the many droughts the western US routinely experiences.

After serving two years on the California Graywater Ad-Hoc Committee the legislature had funded to investigate greywater reuse, Mr. Bilson sponsored California Assembly Bill #3518 in 1992, which passed unanimously in both houses (almost unheard of). AB3518 resulted in our nation’s first-of-its-kind state greywater irrigation law found as California Water Code Section 14875 et seg.

In 1993, Steve Bilson received US Patent #5,217,323 on the greywater irrigation system that evolved into what is known as the ReWater® System. It’s still the only commercially available greywater irrigation system in the US that’s legal in all states.

In 1992-1994, he worked literally thousands of hours with virtually every local, regional, and state building safety and environmental health protection agency and interest group in California to help write the first state greywater irrigation code for single-family systems.

In 1995, he sponsored AB313 to allow multi-family systems, and then worked again with those stakeholders and several others to improve the code several times. Now included are multi-family and commercial systems, and rain harvesting systems. The code is now Chapter 15 of the California Plumbing Code.

For years, Mr. Bilson was ReWater’s Responsible Managing Employee for ReWater®’s landscape contractor’s license #798547 and provided hands-on supervision of numerous residential and commercial landscaping projects all using greywater and/or rain.

Mr. Bilson has also been involved in other states’ efforts to legalize greywater irrigation. He continues to warn about the failure of NSF 350-certified systems that were only approved when NSF used a “greywater” recipe that failed to include hair and lint, the biggest challenge to filters and emitters.

He’s helped clients as philosophically diverse as the Natural Resources Defense Council to the US Marine Corps, with landscapes as diverse as desert to almost tropical. He’s now responsible for more permitted i.e. legal greywater irrigation systems in California than everyone else combined.

When not at work, he’s either with his family, flying aerobatics and BFM/ACM, hunting, fishing, skiing, or somewhere in the great outdoors on another adventure.