Company History

In 1956, Glenn Rehbein started Lino Sod Company with little more than a sod cutter, a small truck, and a commitment to be the best. Today, Glenn Rehbein Companies is highly diversified, encompassing turf farming, sports field and golf course design and construction, mass excavation, real estate development, environmental remediation, engineering, and utilities.

In keeping with Glenn’s legacy of innovation, Rehbein Environmental Solutions seeks to continually grow the resources and network Glenn and his family built to meet the demands of an ever-changing world. We recognize the value of a creative solution, and the importance of looking at the total return of a project, considering the many areas of investment in a piece of property. Leveraging our fifty years of experience in traditional property development methods with the best of today’s environmental technologies, we are making the world cleaner, greener, and more sustainable, one project at a time.

The History of EPIC

Jonas Sipaila received United States Patent #5,921,711 July 13 1999

Frequently observing failed conventional septic leach lines in the 1980s, Jonas Sipaila often faced this reoccurring problem as a New York State health inspector: “How can we develop an effluent leach line that can move water upward to a biological zone, naturally processing the waste into usable nutrients?”

A top graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology for Biology and Chemistry, and a prolific inventor always thinking “out of the box,” Jonas noticed water wicking up a large pile of sand from a nearby puddle on a job site after a recent rain storm. The idea of utilizing a proven, reliable medium that takes advantage of water physics was conceived. Sand was part of the solution. Combining the concepts of subsurface irrigation, subsurface drainage and the capillary movement of water through sand from nearby water sources, Jonas Sipaila invented the first pipe designed specifically for contact with sand, solving problems that had hampered and clogged various other subsurface systems attempted in the past.

A true grass-roots effort culminated in the formation of Evaporative Control Systems, Inc. beginning the new millennium in 2000. Essentially turning irrigation “upside-down” with no moving parts and 100% efficiency, while simultaneously providing superior drainage all with one product, the ECS chamber was conceived and brought to market. Intimately accustomed with environmentally sound products and practices, Glenn Rehbein Companies became one of the first distributors of ECS technology, going on to eventually buy the rights to what quickly became one of the flagship products for Rehbein Environmental Solutions. Recognizing the extraordinary value of this system, Rehbein renamed the system to the EPIC System in 2006.