The residue produced by the extraction of sago starch is usually discarded as a waste material. In this study, we phosphorylated the sago starch-extraction residue with phosphoryl chloride and used the phosphorylated residue to remove cadmium from wastewater. The phosphoric ester functionality in the phosphorylated residue was evaluated by means of infrared microspectrometry and solid-state NMR. The dependence of the cadmium sorption behavior on pH, contact time, and electrolyte concentration and the maximum sorption capacity of the phosphorylated residue were also studied. The cadmium sorption varied with pH and electrolyte concentration, and the maximum sorption capacity was 25.2 mg g(-1), which is almost half the capacity of commercially available weakly acidic cation exchange resins. The phosphorylated residue could be reused several times, although cadmium sorption gradually decreased as the number of sorption-desorption cycles increased. The phosphorylated residue sorbed cadmium rapidly, which is expected to be favorable for the continuous operation in a column. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.