The removal of toxins is important due to the damage to aquatic environment. In this work, a facile and green approach based on mussel-inspired coatings was used to fabricate amino-coated particles via the reaction between amine and catechol, using hexanediamine as the representative amine. The particles were characterized by Attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), thermo gravimetric analysis (TGA), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The particles showed selective adsorption capability to Congo red (CR) and the adsorption process fitted the pseudo-second-order model, the intraparticle diffusion model, the Langmuir isotherm, the Freundlich isotherm and the Sips isotherm well. Furthermore, this approach was verified to have applicability to various amines such as diethylenetriamine (DETA), triethylenetetramine (TETA) and tetraethylenepentamine (TEPA), and the amino-coated particles exhibited diverse adsorption capacities to CR, Cu2+ and bilirubin. Considering that the approach is easy to operate and the whole preparation process is in an aqueous solution, it is believed that the facile, green and economical approach has great potential to prepare particles for wastewater treatment. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.