The City of Albany, Georgia, has faced a difficult problem of providing consistent, dependable treatment for highly variable, high strength cellulose fiber and oil and grease wastes from two major industries. Efforts to upgrade operations at the Albany Water Pollution Control Plant (WPCP) provide an excellent opportunity to examine, at full scale, the relationship between major contributions of conventional industrial wastewater pollutants and operations at a municipal/industrial activated sludge treatment plant. At present many wastewater agencies are developing industrial pretreatment programs. Some of them are finding that federal industrial pretreatment regulations are relatively unspecific regarding the control of conventional pollutants (such as organic loading and suspended solids). These agencies may benefit from the lessons learned in the Albany operations upgrading.