Recent studies have shown great interest toward heavy metal removal due to its hazardous and non-biodegradable properties. Many approaches have been used for this purpose and one of them is adsorption. In this study, several experiments were carried out to investigate the feasibility of factory tea waste as a biosorbent in a fixed-bed adsorption column for heavy metal removal (zinc and copper) in wastewater. The results highlighted that zinc has better performance compared to copper in terms of the effect of initial ion concentration, pH value, and the mixed ions with respect to the removal efficiency. Zinc showed higher removal efficiency and adsorption capacity at the initial metal ion concentration of 200 mg/L, which are 99.21 and 39.68 mg/mg compared to copper. Meanwhile, for the effect of pH values and mixed ion concentration, zinc also showed slightly higher removal efficiency which are 99.91 and 98.47, respectively compared to copper. However, both zinc and copper showed a better fit to the Langmuir isotherm. The factory tea waste was characterized using Micromeritics ASAP 2020 instrument and results showed that the factory tea waste biosorbent consists of mesopores with the diameter and width of 4.85205 and 2.546985 nm, respectively. © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)