The adsorption of Cu2+ from aqueous solution by magnetite-immobilised chitin (MC) was studied in batch mode. Two conventional adsorbents, cation exchange resin (CER) and activated carbon (AC) were used for the comparison. The physicochemical parameters including pH, concentration of adsorbent, temperature and initial Cu2+ concentration were optimised. Under the optimised conditions, the removal efficiencies of Cu2+ for MC, CER and AC were 91.67, 93.36 and 89.16%, respectively. In addition, the removal capacities of Cu2+ for MC, CER and AC were 56.71, 74.84 and 6.55 mg/g, respectively. The adsorption isotherm studies indicated that the adsorptive behaviour of Cu2+ on three adsorbents could be well described by the Langmuir model. The maximum adsorption capacities (qmax) for MC, CER and AC were 53.19, 89.29 and 5.82 mg/g, respectively. The applicability of the kinetic model has been investigated for MC. Experimental results indicated that a pseudo-second-order reaction model provided the best description of the data with a correlation coefficient 0.999 for different initial Cu2+ concentrations. The rate constants were also determined. Various thermodynamic parameters such as standard free energy (DeltaG 0), enthalpy (DeltaH 0) and entropy (DeltaS 0) were calculated for predicting the adsorption nature of MC. The results indicated that this system was a spontaneous and endothermic process.