Treatment of desizing wastewater, a typical high strength industrial wastewater, by catalytic wet-air oxidation (WAO) is studied. The desizing wastewater sample was obtained from a large textile dyeing and finishing plant. Experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of temperature and catalyst dosage (CuSO4 and Cu(NO3)(2)) on the pollutant (chemical oxygen demand or COD) removal. It is observed that over 80% of the COD removal can be realized in an hour of the catalytic WAO process. A kinetic model was also developed and a two-stage, first-order kinetic expression was found to represent well the treatment reaction. The correlations between the reaction rate coefficients and the temperature and catalyst dosage were also determined.