The rapid growth of population, industrialization and urbanization tends to deteriorate the quality of available water bodies. This scenario became vulnerable to the environment, and it has alarmed the community to resolve this issue. A large variety of pollutants occur from the above activities, specifically heavy metals creating severe toxicity to human and other living organisms. A variety of heavy metals removal techniques have been established in recent decades, among which a simple adsorption using carbon nanocomposites was found effective for the eradication of heavy metal pollutants. Therefore, present chapter discussed the heavy metals removal procedures using graphene and CNTs with a special emphasis on their functionalization. This chapter summarised the toxicity of heavy metals to plants, aquatic life and human health along with some effective remediation approaches. Further, it clearly described the cutting edge methods reported for the heavy metals elimination from aqueous media using graphene and CNT nanocomposites through adsorption. At last, future recommendations that are required to upgrade the capacity of adsorbents by using environmentally safe CBNs sorbents were proposed following short conclusions. © 2021, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.