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The frequentness of serious natural disasters will rise against the background of climate change in the next decades. One of the most severe impacts of natural disasters is the interruption of drinking water supply. Contaminated water causes the death of thousands of people worldwide every year. Mobile waterworks used by aid organizations are sophisticated systems with high demand of energy, skilled personnel and chemicals. They are designed to supply larger communities in the range of (several) thousand people but small and secluded areas can not be reached. The Department of Sanitary and Environmental Engineering (DESEE) at University of Kassel developed a small, transportable and easy to use dead-end membrane filtration unit for basic water supply in cases of natural disasters for small groups in the range of 200 up to 500 people in remote areas, the “WaterBackpack”. Experimental long-term series show that the unit is able to provide water in sufficient quantity and quality for the defined use case. Tests with contaminated surface water revealed, that a minimum flux of around 5 L m−2 h−1 can be kept up over a period of more than two month without any cleaning or maintenance.

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Massive improvements of municipal wastewater treatment during the last 20 years have significantly reduced the pollution load on our bodies of water. At the same time, pollution load resulting from combined sewer overflows (CSO) has increased, which has made appropriate countermeasures necessary. Up to now, this has been achieved by introducing combined wastewater basins in accordance with the German ATV standard A 128 which deals with the design and construction of this type of installation. However, the effect of these installations is limited, according to their specific size, and especially the reduction of nutrient compounds is not sufficient, as these installations may include sedimentation as a first treatment process which does not affect the soluble substances at all. The only technology that is capable of reducing settable compounds as well as soluble compounds is a plant‐covered retention soil filter (RSF). The first retention soil filters were built in Germany about 10 years ago at a few sites to treat stormwater overflows from combined sewer systems (CSO) in order to meet advanced standards. This paper introduces the technology of RSFs for the treatment of combined water and deals with design, operation principles, some current suggestions for the construction site, and for the first time, the results of a long period of operation on the basis of long‐term investigations at RSF Fulda, which is the second oldest RSF in Germany (1994). Even so, in Germany RSFs are used for the treatment of stormwater.