IntroductionNatural water resources are becoming increasingly scarce. Thus, the state of the environment has become one of humanity's major concerns because of its degradation. This degradation is mainly due to industrial development which generates effluents discharged into the receiving environment without any treatment in most cases. These releases consist of toxic chemical elements and compounds, including heavy metals, which pose a serious threat to our environment and impair water quality. Currently, they are of great concern because of their toxicity to ecosystems and their harmful effects on human health. Cadmium, copper, and lead are considered to be dangerous micropollutants [1], the toxicity caused by these metals is considered to be high even to the state of traces [2]. Many cleaning methods and techniques have been developed in recent years to remove heavy metals from polluted waters. These techniques include chemical precipitation processes, flocculation, filtration, ion exchange, membrane processes, and adsorption [3][4][5][6][7][8]. The most used and studied method is adsorption method, due to its ease of use and the high availability and abundance of natural adsorbents [9][10][11][12]. Activated carbons are among the most widely used materials due to their high adsorption capacity [13], but they have numerous disadvantages, including high cost, intraparticle resistance in the adsorption process, low mechanical strength, and difficulty to regenerate. [14].Natural clay minerals have recently received considerable attention as alternative materials that are less expensive, nontoxic, and abundant and that have multifunctional properties depending on the type of clay [15]. The main advantages of using these materials are due to their different characteristics, low cost, and abundant availability.The aim of this study is the valorization of a Moroccan natural clay as an adsorbent for the removal of cadmium, copper, and lead from synthetic aqueous solutions. The adsorbent was characterized using the X-ray fluorescence (XRF), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and X-ray diffraction (XRD) methods. To better understand the nature
