Biological treatment of coke and steel-processing wastewaters has to satisfy both industrial economic needs and environmental protection regulations. Nevertheless, as some of the pollutants contained in these waters or produced during the treatment are highly toxic, an effective and safe treatment has proved to be difficult to obtain. This paper reports the study of a biological method for the treatment of wastewaters containing free cyanide, thiocyanate and ammonium (NH4). Laboratory-scale activated-sludge reactors were fed with a synthetic solution reproducing a steel-processing industrial wastewater and inoculated with the same industrial bacterial seeding used on-site (Ecosynergie Inc.). The results demonstrated that free cyanide and thiocyanate were efficiently degraded. Nevertheless, thiocyanate degradation and nitrification processes were actually inhibited by the free ammonia form (NH3) in place of the ionized NH4 form (NH4+) currently dosed and often unproperly named "ammonia" [IUPAC, 1997. In: McNaught, A.D., Wilkinson, A. (compilers). Compendium of Chemical Terminology. Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, UK]. Optimum degradation rates were obtained for very narrow ranges of ammonia nitrogen (NH3-N) concentrations. This result can be explained by the role of pH, which mainly controls the NH3/NH4 equilibrium. Pollutants and NH3 concentrations influenced degradation rates of main pollutants. This influence was determined and expressed through elementary equations. Although the Michaelis-Menten equation could have been used to describe thiocyanate degradation, a Haldane-inhibition model was used to satisfactorily describe cyanide degradation. On the other hand, a slightly modified Haldane model was applied to describe both NH4 oxidation using NH3-N as substrate and thiocyanate degradation using NH3-N as inhibitor. These findings emphasize the role of pH on degradation rates and allow one to optimize operational conditions in the biological treatment of coke and steel industrial wastewaters.