The potentiality of tea waste for the adsorptive removal of methylene blue, a cationic dye, from aqueous solution was studied. Batch kinetics and isotherm studies were carried out under varying experimental conditions of contact time, initial methylene blue concentration, adsorbent dosage and pH. The nature of the possible adsorbent and methylene blue interactions was examined by the FTIR technique. The pH(pzc) of the adsorbent was estimated by titration method and a value of 4.3 +/- 0.2 was obtained. An adsorption-desorption study was carried out resulting the mechanism of adsorption was reversible and ion-exchange. Adsorption equilibrium of tea waste reached within 5 h for methylene blue concentrations of 20-50 mg/L. The sorption was analyzed using pseudo-first-order and pseudo-second order kinetic models and the sorption kinetics was found to follow a pseudo-second order kinetic model. The extent of the dye removal increased with increasing initial dye concentration. The equilibrium data in aqueous solutions were well represented by the Langmuir isotherm model. The adsorption capacity of methylene blue onto tea waste was found to be as high as 85.16 mg/g, which is several folds higher than the adsorption capacity of a number of recently studied in the literature potential adsorbents. Tea waste appears as a very prospective adsorbent for the removal of methylene blue from aqueous solution. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.