The oil shale waste material, retorted shale, was utilized as an adsorbent for Cu(II) removal from aqueous solution. The kinetics and thermodynamic adsorption was investigated during a series of batch adsorption experiments. The removal efficiency was controlled by solution pH, temperature, initial ion concentration and contact time. Two simple kinetic models, pseudo-first-and second-order, were used to investigate the adsorption mechanisms. The pseudo-second-order chemical reaction kinetics provides the best correlation with the experimental data. Langmuir and Freundlich models were used to fit the equilibrium data, which showed that Langmuir best-fitted these data. Thermodynamic parameters such as free energy, enthalpy and entropy were calculated to predict the nature of the adsorption process. (c) 2007 Published by Elsevier B.V.