Amongst the most persistent environmental issues is the amount of discharged industrial wastewater and the frequent oil spills accidents occurring during oil production and transportation activities. Therefore, the damages brought by these events calls for emerging technologies that can successfully tackle these issues by providing a rapid and efficient separation of oil pollutants from water surfaces. Particularly, while the traditional oil-water separation (OWS) methods have been demonstrated to be less effective towards offering a quick response to these disasters at large-scale due to several drawbacks. After reporting the development of a novel and advanced proof-of-concept pilot-scale oil-water separator skimmer (OWSS) prototype module for oil-water separation, herein, we fully investigate the performance of this system. This system was built around an effective combination of hydrophobic-hydrophilic sorbent materials-based OWS bed and a vacuum-assisted oil recovery system. As a result, the OWSS system showed excellent OWS performance with high oil removal flux, outstanding stability and recyclability, excellent separation efficiency and selectivity. The effect of various operating parameters on the OWSS performance were successfully investigated including, type and composition of oils/solvents, oil viscosity and separation column packing length. Hence, this system promotes the implementation of sorbent materials at a larger scale in a more efficient, environmentally-friendly and cost-effective manner. Furthermore, we believe that the obtained results make the developed OWS system a potential candidate towards finding a sustainable solution for practical environmental applications including the cleanup of oil spills and the removal of oily pollutants from water.