“…In our work was selected a commercial copper-zinc catalysts from the S ud-Chemie Group, Munich, that have been used by several authors in the CWO of aqueous phenol solutions (Pintar & Levec, 1992Pintar, Bercic, & Levec, 1997), p-coumaric acid (Mantzavinos, Hellenbrand, Livingston, & Metcalfe, 1997), azo dyes (Donlagic & Levec, 1998) and in industrial e uents (Quinta-Ferreira, Silva, & Redondo, 2001). Imamura, Fukuda, and Ishida (1988) studied the CWO of poly(ethylene glycol) over a ruthenium catalyst and concluded that formaldehyde and formic acid are formed during the reaction being further oxidised. They also concluded that the use of cerium oxide as support of ruthenium improves its catalytic activity, more than other materials, such as, Al 2 O 3 , NaY zeolite, ZrO 2 and TiO 2 .…”