The growing environmental awareness and the demand for high efficiency of natural resource encourage industry to look for alternative environmentally benign materials. In this work, a new geopolymer/alginate hybrid spheres (GAS) was fabricated from the green geopolymer and sodium alginate by a feasible one-pot method. The effect of mass ratio of geopolymer and sodium alginate (Geo/SA) on the properties of GAS was investigated. The results demonstrated that the GAS-4 (Geo/SA =1: 0.16) had a good sphericity with an inner honeycomb structure. The GAS-4 was used as an adsorbent for the removal of Cu(II) in water. Batch-wise adsorption indicated GAS-4 possessed an excellent Cu(II) removal efficiency (99 +/- 3.4%) from a 50 mg/L solution with a dosage of 0.15 g/100 mL. The adsorption kinetic was fitted well by the pseudo-second-order model, indicating the chemical interaction of GAS-4 and Cu(II). The adsorption isotherm followed the Langmuir model indicating a monolayer adsorption of Cu(II) on GAS-4. Moreover, application of GAS-4 in a column mode for the continuous treatment of Cu(II) effluents exhibited optimum breakthrough curves by adjusting the bed heights. The experimental breakthrough curves were correlated with the Thomas, Adams-Bohart and Yoon-Nelson models. The overall results strongly suggested that the GAS-4 hybrid sphere was not only environmentally friendly, cost-effective but also could be applied for the continuous treatment of heavy metals containing water. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.