The Lippeverband is a public German water board (“Wasserwirtschaftsverband”) located in Dortmund (North Rhine-Westphalia/Germany) and responsible for 3.280 km² of the Lippe catchment from Lippborg down to the river Rhine with 1.4 Mio. citizens. The Lippeverband offers modern, cost-effective water management that covers a broad range of responsibilities. The main tasks are sewage treatment, care and maintenance of waterways, natural remodelling of open waste water canals, flood protection, regulation of water flow and management of groundwater and rainwater.

The river Lippe appears as a two-tier water course: Upstream, eastward of the city of Hamm/Lippborg, the catchment is more rural. Downstream of Hamm settlements and industrial impacts characterize the situation. Preconditions for the industrialization started with the construction of the Cologne-Minden trunk line in the 1840s that connected the river Rhine settlements like Cologne with harbours and trade at the river Weser and on this route with Lippe towns, too. Moreover, this railway supported the coal and steel industry development in the whole northern Ruhr region. The hard coal mining that started in the middle of the 19th century in the Emscher catchment area developed in the following decades direction north. In the Lippe catchment area from the 1860s on first problems from mining subsidence and drainage of polluted water appeared. Villages and towns located at the Lippe and its tributary Seseke (Werl, Unna, Hamm, Bönen, Kamen, Bergkamen, Lünen and Dortmund) expanded quickly with the establishing of hard coal mines between 1856 and World War I. The industrialization caused huge water quality problems in the Lippe, its tributaries and the settlements; therefore first in 1913 the Sesekegenossenschaft and later in 1926 the Lippeverband as public water boards (“Wasserwirtschaftsverbände”) were established.

The Sesekegenossenschaft was from 1913 on responsible for the water management and the precursor of the Lippeverband from 1926 on. The Lippe tributary Seseke has a catchment area of 319,45 km² and drains the towns of Werl, Unna, Bönen, Kamen, Bergkamen, Lünen and the east of Dortmund. The Seseke catchment area suffered from “subsidence funnels” where waste water, surface run-off and water from the creeks gathered and digested; so interdisciplinary solutions were needed, comparable to the Emschergenossenschaft in the neighboring catchment area which hosted the Sesekegenossenschaft in the first years. The municipalities were responsible for the inner city drainage systems and interconnection points were jointly defined where the Sesekegenossenschaft took over responsibility. Those were normally the subcatchment parts where underground sewer systems were impossible as the mining subsidence would have caused damages continuously and waste water would have infiltrated in groundwater and soil. The Sesekegenossenschaft (and later the Lippeverband) then worked on the drainage capacity by cutting the meanders of the water courses, deepening the runways and lining them with concrete, constructing dykes and pumping stations and establishing waste water treatment plants. All discharge from industry, mines and households as well as rain, surface water and natural discharge were collected and drained in these new “concrete streams”. All costs were divided between the “users” of the Seseke system, depending on the volume and load of waste water or drainage capacity or causer (for example the mining companies).

Governmental investigations showed that the measures that were taken in the Seseke system were expected to solve problems in the rest of the Lippe catchment area, too. Formally, the „Lippegesetz“ (Lippe act) was legislated on Januar 19th 1926 and the Sesekegenossenschaft merged into the new water board.

More and more measures had to be taken to compensate negative impacts of the mining that went in northern direction and caused damages in the Lippe catchment area between Hamm and the Lippe mouth at the river Rhine near Wesel. Dykes were built for flood prevention, waste water treatment facilities and pumping stations kept the systems running.

Until the 1970s water pollution played no important role in the public debate but environmental policy changed over the decades. Environmental standards on national level and especially from the EU have been leading to enormous efforts to improve the nature standards and today a couple of positive developments can be stated, like new FFH (Flora Fauna Habitat) sites and governmental initiatives around the WFD (Water Framework Directive).

Especially the sub catchment of the Seseke has experienced enormous efforts to restore the system. Since the 1960s, the coal crisis was leading to the shutdown of more and more mines and the Lippeverband with its administrative, political and industrial members decided to re-develop the Seseke system towards „second hand nature“ – a real restoration compared to the times before industrialization is impossible. Between the 1980s and 2012 four waste water treatment plants were constructed in Bönen, Kamen, Dortmund-Scharnhorst and Lünen. A new 75 km underground sewer system was constructed and 73 km of former “concrete water courses” were restored to work as ecological green belts in the landscape now.

Challenges for the Lippeverband are still the water quality demands. Though the Lippeverband is not a drinking water provider there are water bodies in the catchment area that are used by Gelsenwasser for drinking water supply and where Lippeverband waste water treatment plants are discharging to. The Lippeverband started operating first treatment facilities voluntarily with advanced technologies and initiated European network projects on the environmental impact of pharmaceuticals and personal care products and how to eliminate them from hospitals or domestic waste water.