Abstract: Adsorption of organic pollutants from waste waters at ambient conditions followed by catalytic dry oxidation of these adsorbed materials at low temperatures has been reported to be a promising method for the treatment of toxic and/or biorefractory wastewaters. This work mainly investigated the effect of metal loadings on the catalytic activity of the CuO/AC catalystsorbent used for the catalytic dry oxidation of phenol through temperatureprogrammed oxidation (TPO) and consecutive adsorptionoxidation experiments. The results indicate that increasing metal loadings promotes the phenol oxidation activity of the CuO/AC catalystsorbent, and enhances the affinity between the phenol and the CuO/AC catalystsorbent. This makes the adsorbed phenol desorb and/or deassociatively desorb from the catalystsorbent difficult. In addition, the ignition activity of the CuO/AC catalystsorbent itself is improved with increasing metal loadings. According to these results, it is clear that there is a proper metal loadings range of 3 ~ 5% for the CuO/AC catalystsorbent used for catalytic dry oxidation of phenol, which is calculated as the Cu weight percent.