The effective recovery of trace heavy metals from their wastewaters is an important but challenging work. Here, a promising process of nano-adsorption coupled with flotation had been validated for the recovery of trace Cu2+ from its aqueous solution. Firstly, silica nanoparticles (SNPs) acted as an adsorbing carrier to adsorb Cu2+ (15 mg/L). Subsequently, cetyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) was utilized as a collector to capture SNPs. This process made it possible to combine the advantages of both nano adsorption and flotation. Finally, the recovery efficiencies of Cu2+ and SNP (R-SNP and R-Cu) and the volume ratio (phi) reached 97.1 +/- 4.9%, 94.5 +/- 4.7% and 23.8 +/- 1.2, respectively under the suitable conditions of pH 6.0, SNP concentration 90 mg/L, CTAB concentration 35 mg/L, the adding time of CTAB 5 min and flotation column height 750 mm. By using this process, a suitable foam stability could be achieved because SNPs, apart from being an adsorbing carrier, also served as a foam stabilizer to significantly enhance the foaming stability. Furthermore, Cu2+ was easily isolated from the recovered SNPs. Overall, this present work was highly effective for the recovery of trace Cu2+ from its aqueous solution. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.