Advanced oxidation processes are an emerging option to treatment of the painting industry effluents. The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of the Fenton and photo-Fenton processes in chemical oxygen demand (COD), total organic carbon (TOC) and phenolic compounds removal from wastewaters generated during alkydic resins manufacture. The optimized treatment conditions are the following: pH 3.0, 15.15 x 10(-3) moI L-1 FeSO4 and 0.30 moI L-1 H2O2 for a reaction time of 6h. photo-Fenton experiments were carried out in the presence of sunlight or artificial radiation and complementary additions of H2O2 were made for all experiments. The best results were obtained with photo-Fenton process assisted with solar radiation, with reductions of 99.5 and 99.1% of COD and TOC levels, respectively. Fenton and photo-Fenton (with artificial irradiation) processes presented lower but not insignificant removals, within 60-80% reduction for both COD and TOC. In addition, an excellent removal (95%) of total phenols was obtained using photo-Fenton process assisted with artificial irradiation. This study demonstrated that the use of photo-Fenton process on alkydic resins wastewater treatment is very promising especially when solar light is used. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.