In this work, the recovery of phenol from a phenolic resin plant effluent by emulsion liquid membranes has been investigated. The selected membrane phase allowed a selective recovery of phenol towards formaldehyde by this technology. The effect on phenol permeation of relevant variables such as volume phase ratio between the effluent and the internal phase (in the 10-42 range), stirring speed (in the 300-500 rpm range), temperature (in the 288-313 K range) and permeation time (in the 0-600 s range) was studied. The application of the advancing front model describes well the experimental results (deviations lower than 10% were obtained in the first minutes of permeation). (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier B.V.