ABSTRACT Environmental friendly adsorbents constitute an effective method for heavy metals pollution mitigation. In this work, batch adsorption experiments were conducted for the adsorption of various heavy metals including Cr, Co, Ni and Pb using cost-effective modified adsorbents. These comprise polyacrylate hydrogels prepared using microwave (M) irradiation technique (ACM) or ultrasonic (U) irradiation technique (ACU). Further blends of acrylic acid salts with Egyptian kaolin (AKM and AKU) or zeolite (AZM and AZU) were also investigated. The effect of pH and initial concentration on the performance of the composite hydrogels has been studied. Also, several adsorption isotherm and kinetic models were studied. AKU revealed the highest maximum adsorption capacities among other investigated composites for all the tested heavy metals. The equilibrium adsorption experiments revealed that Langmuir isotherm model is best fitted than other models with maximum adsorption capacities of 84.5, 73.3, 61 and 97 mg/g for Cr, Co, Ni and Pb, respectively and equivalent results were obtained from Tempkin isotherm for all ions except Ni. Adsorption kinetics of Cr, Co, Ni and Pb using all the composite hydrogels were best described with the Pseudo-second order kinetic model.