In this investigation, extraction and enrichment of iridium and silver ions were carried out using emulsion liquid membrane (ELM) as model compounds from aqueous solutions and separation of heavy metals from wastewaters from Mobarakeh Steel Company. In the ELM system, the mass transfer flux is high because of large surface to volume ratio. This would facilitate extraction of metal and nonmetal ions in ppm, concentrations. One of the applications of this method is recovery and reuse of heavy metals from industrial wastewaters. Response surface methodology is a powerful tool in minimization of number of experiments that involve interactive parameters. This technique involves three factorial designs giving number of input (independent) factors and their corresponding relationship between one or more measured dependent responses. Response surface methodology (RSM) was used to determine the minimum number of experiments in order to study separation of these ions by ELM technique. The liquid membrane used was composed of liquid paraffin as the solvent, sorbitan monooleate (SPAN-80) as the surfactant, perchloric acid as the internal reagent and Bis (2-ethylhexyl) phosphoric acid (D2EHPA) as the carrier.The process parameters namely, surfactant concentration, carrier concentration, contact time, external pH, speed of agitation and volume fraction of oil to internal phase on the extraction and enrichment of iridium were optimized using Box–Behnken design. An orthogonal 48 Box–Behnken design with six replicates at the center point, all in duplicates, resulting in a total of 54 experiments were used to optimize the chosen key variables for maximum amount of the extraction and enrichment and minimum amount of swelling on ELM. The results show that the optimal values for surfactant concentration, carrier concentration, contact time, speed of agitation, external pH and volume fraction of oil to internal phase of system were 1.59%v/v, 0.08 molar, 29.5 min, 234 rpm, 5.3 and 1.36, respectively. At the optimized conditions the maximum iridium extraction and enrichment and minimum swelling of system were 98.18%, 13.38 and 11 respectively. The process parameters namely, surfactant concentration, carrier concentration, external pH and volume fraction of membrane to external phase on the extraction and enrichment of silver were optimized using Box–Behnken design. The results show that the optimal values for surfactant concentration, carrier concentration, external pH and volume fraction of membrane to external phase of the system were 3.28%v/v, 0.05 molar, 6.89 and 0.23, respectively. At the optimized conditions the maximum silver extraction and enrichment of system were 96% and 10.3 respectively. To evaluate the effectiveness of ELM technique, real wastewater from Mobarakeh Steel Company that contains several heavy metal ions was used and optimized conditions for metal ion separation was obtained. Results pertaining to separation of heavy metals from Mobarakeh steel Co. wastewaters show that the optimal values for surfactant concentration, carrier concentration, volume fraction of internal to oil phase and volume fraction of membrane to external phase of the system were 2%v/v, 0.05 molar, 0.7 and 0.2, respectively. All in all, results of this study demonstrate that ELM is a viable technique for separation of dilute solutions.