The ability of vegetable wastes such as grape stalks and exhausted coffee to remove metals ions from synthetic aqueous solutions has been demonstrated in various studies performed by our research group [Villaescusa et al. 2004; Valderrama et al. 2010]. In this work, the performance of these wastes to remove nickel ions from an exhausted electroplating bath of a metal finishing industry from Barcelona (Spain) has been investigated. The experiments were carried out at room temperature in packed bed flow-up columns of 250 mm of length and 25 mm internal diameter using grape stalk (GS) and exhausted coffee wastes (EC) particle size 0.5-1.0 mm and 0.8-1.0 mm, respectively. In all experiments nickel concentration was kept constant about 5500 mg dm-3 and pH, flow rate, and bed height were varied in order to predict nickel ions transport in the column. Breakthrough curves were successfully described by Bed depth service time (BDST), Thomas and Yoon Nelson models [Zhe et al. 2013]. Desorption studies were performed by using 0.1 mol dm-3 HCl as elution solution at the same flow-rate used for sorption experiments. The results obtained demonstrated that, in the studied experimental conditions, variation of initial pH, flow rate and bed height did not lead to significant differences on sorption capacity. The sorbent sorption capacity was higher for GS (20 mg•g-1) than for EC (12 mg•g-1) and metal recovery from the column was close to 50% and 10% for GS and EC, respectively.