Newly emerged nanomaterials, such as graphene or carbon nanotubes, are of increasingly widespread importance in environmental remediation, especially in their ability to remove undesirable chemicals from hydrological systems. Despite recent advances, the high cost of these materials and the relative inability to regenerate them hinders their use at larger scales. Although it is commonly held that adsorption in fixed bed processes is more efficient than in batch processes, the definition of efficiency needs to be examined closely. In this paper, we show that there exists a critical effluent concentration above which batch processes are more efficient than fixed bed processes from this perspective. This work proposes a simple method to choose either batch or fixed bed processes when the goal is to minimize the quantity of adsorbent needed to remove contaminants to below a specified threshold level. It also provides a systematic set of self-consistency checks on experimental measurements that may be used for comparative studies of these methods.