A novel approach was developed to suppress surfactant wetting during membrane distillation process for industrial wastewater treatment. In this work, a thin layer of agarose hydrogel was attached to the surface of hydrophobic porous Teflon membrane. This composite membrane was tested against aqueous NaCI solution containing various surfactants to determine the effectiveness for preventing surfactant wetting. These surfactants included sodium dodecyl sullonate (SDS), Tween20, and Tween85. The results showed that no wetting occurred during the 24 h period of membrane distillation against 10 mg/L of SDS or Tween20. On the other hand, surfactant still penetrated through the hydrogel when the concentration was above the critical micelle concentration (CMC) of the surfactant. Even so, the wetting occurred to a lower extent at a slower pace. In addition, no wetting was observed when testing against dyeing wastewater. A model to explain this phenomenon was proposed based on the entrapment of surfactant at the interface between water and hydrogel. Although the attachment of agarose hydrogel layer would reduce the flux to about 71% of the flux using bare membrane, this approach did make membrane distillation able to recover high purity water from dyeing wastewater. (C) 2014 Elsevier By. All rights reserved.