ReWater’s Early Adoption and Activism

Reusing your good indoor water was illegal when Stephen Bilson founded ReWater® Systems in Palo Alto in 1990.

AB2355 had authorized DWR to establish the California Graywater Ad-Hoc Committee to investigate the possibility of people reusing their own good water and he served two years on that committee.

But after fighting the City of Los Angeles-dominated International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials’ endlessly absurd objections to homeowners reusing their own water, in 1992 he sponsored AB3518 to override IAPMO’s usual role in code changes and which passed unanimously in both houses (almost unheard of).

AB3518 was codified as California Water Code Section 14875 et seg. and directed DWR and DHS (now DPH) to create a code that would result in the “maximum, safe use” of this type of water in irrigation.

He then worked literally thousands of hours with virtually every local, regional, and state stakeholder in California to help write the first state code for such single-family systems.

In 1993, he received US Patent #5,217,323 on the underground drip irrigation system for such water that’s evolved into what’s now known as the ReWater® System.

Then he sponsored AB313 in 1995 to allow multi-family systems, and again worked with those and other stakeholders to improve the code several times.

In 2011, he worked with the California legislature on AB849 to crack down on some absurdists in city building departments who refused to let go of their antiquated bias against homeowners reusing water. AB849 amended Water Code Section 14875 to require proof of some alleged need in order to restrict the state code.

Due to his decades of efforts, single-family, multi-family, and commercial greywater irrigation systems are now in the California Plumbing Code in Chapter 15 and rain irrigation systems are in Chapter 16.

For years, Mr. Bilson was ReWater’s Responsible Managing Employee for ReWater’s landscape contractor’s license #798547 and he has significant first-hand experience with such systems.

He continues to warn about the failure of even the latest and greatest of IAPMO’s ANSI/NSF 350 “certified” filter systems that fail from normal laundry processes and that eventually clog drip irrigation with organic build-up.

With clients as philosophically diverse as the Natural Resources Defense Council to the US Marine Corps, and with landscapes as diverse as desert to almost tropical, he’s now responsible for more permitted grey water recycling irrigation systems in California than everyone else combined. And that doesn’t count the non permitted systems that comprise the vast majority of systems installed in the arid west.