As the number of the world population has increased so has the demand for food and energy which led to an increase of agricultural and industrial pollution. Along with all the benefits that the development brings, there are numerous disadvantages such as increasing the amount of pollutants in the environment such as nitrates, heavy metals, fluoride, and many others. Large amounts of nitrates are discharged due to the excessive use of natural and artificial fertilizers in agricultural production, or inadequate disposal of waste materials from variety of industries, and since nitrates very soluble in water it easily gets in the surface and groundwater sources and often in drinking water supplies. Water is essential for life so water quality can significantly affect human health, and therefore water pollution by nitrates should be reduced and development of adequate methods to remove nitrates is an important step. So far there have been developed numerous methods to remove nitrates, such as chemical and biological denitrification, reverse osmosis, ion exchange and adsorption. Adsorption has shown to be very effective method of removing nitrates so there have been conducted numerous studies on the use of various materials which can be used as adsorbents and efficiency of these materials for the removal of nitrates was investigated. Materials which in other industries represent waist are often used as materials from which adsorbents are made, so the adsorption can be considered the ecological method. In this paper based on literary data different methods of removing nitrate from the water were described, with special emphases on the adsorption methods of removing nitrates from water using different adsorption agents.