The hydrous zirconium oxide was loaded successfully onto the polymeric adsorbent (D401) to obtain a new adsorbing material (D401-Zr). The adsorptive behavior of arsenic from an aquatic environment by using D401-Zr under different experimental conditions was investigated. The results indicated that D401-Zr had a good adsorption capacity to As(V) at pH < 5.2, whereas As(III) was well adsorbed in the pH range from 6.3 to 9.2. The static experiment data showed that the adsorption isotherm presented a good fitting to the Langmuir model. Adsorption kinetics of arsenic at different concentrations was well described in terms of a pseudo-second-order equation with regard to correlation coefficients and adsorption capacity. The removal percentage of D401-Zr to As(V) still reached more than 90 % in the presence of the coexisting ions such as SO42- and Cl-, but PO43- and F- had a strong inhibition on As(V), which would cause the removal percentage decreasing obviously.