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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
[9] Moreover, artists and landscape architects are involved in projects to capitalize the newly developed ecological and leisure qualities, for example in the frame of the cultural events of Ruhr.2010 or “Über Wasser gehen” (“walking on water”), a joint initiative of the cities Lünen, Bergkamen, Kamen, Bönen, Unna, Dortmund, the district Unna, the regional planning assembly Ruhr and the “Urbane Künste Ruhr”.
[11] The work related to tributaries, waste water management and man-made impact has to be financed by the municipalities, businesses, industry and mining companies etc., operationally carried out by the Lippeverband.
With an amendment of the Lippeverband act (LippeVG) [2] in 1990 the responsibilities have been extended to smaller catchment areas of tributaries to the Rhine close to the Lippemouth (Mommbach, Stollbach, Langhorster Leitgraben, Lohberger Entwässerungsgraben, Bruckhauser Mühlenbach, Rotbach).