The industrial tanning of leather usually produces considerable amounts of chromium-containing solid waste and liquid effluents and raises many concerns on its environmental effect as well as on escalating landfill costs. Actually, these shortcomings are becoming increasingly a limiting factor to this industrial activity that claims for alternative methods of residue disposals. In this work, it is proposed a novel alternative destination of the solid waste, based on the removal of organic contaminants from the out coming aqueous-residue. The adsorption isotherm pattern for the wet blue leather from the Aurea tanning industry in Erechim-RS (Brazil) showed that these materials present high activity on adsorbing the reactive red textile dye as well as other compounds. The adsorbent materials were characterized by lR spectroscopy and SEM and tested for the dye adsorption (reactive textile and methylene blue dyes). The concentrations of dyes were measured by UV-vis spectrophotometry and the chromium extraction from leather waste was realized by basic hydrolysis and determined by atomic absorption. As a low cost abundant adsorbent material with high adsorption ability on removing dye methylene blue (80 mg g(-1)) and textile dye reactive red (163 mg g(-1)), the leather waste is revealed to be a interesting alternative relatively to more costly adsorbent materials. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.