Industrial waste (tailing dumps, sludges, ore, and overburden dumps) produced by mining facilities is one of the major pollutants of the East Kazakhstan’s aquatic ecosystem with heavy metals. As of today, pollution of aquatic systems with heavy metals still remains an important problem due to their high bioavailability, mobility and toxicity. Large areas of tailing dumps pose a potential threat for heavy metals and toxic elements to travel to drinking surface waters. Sorption and desorption reactions of heavy metals depend on various environmental factors and their interactions. As part of the previous studies of small rivers in the East Kazakhstan, the scale of their pollution from industrial facilities in Ridder was studied. As a result of accidental discharges of effluents from major mining plants of the region, an excessive amount of maximum permissible concentrations (MPC) of Zn, Cd, Fe, Pb, Mn were detected. Such treatment techniques for effluents as drying, application of ultraviolet irradiation are costly and inefficient with respect to HM. Thus, the production of cheap and efficient natural material-based adsorbents for treating effluents from heavy metals remains an important challenge. One solution to the issue of treating polluted water is the use of sorbents. The A. B. Bekturov Institute of Chemical Sciences has developed a technology to obtain an ecologically friendly modified humate-containing product from the brown coals of the Shubarkol deposit of the Republic of Kazakhstan. In order to apply the humate-containing product under natural conditions without changing the pH in the medium of industrially polluted waters, the Institute of Radiation Safety and Ecology (Kurchatov, Kazakhstan) conducted studies of the identified sorption abilities for the treatment of wastewater coming from sedimentation tanks and tailing dumps to the streambeds of small rivers in the study region. The results of the study allow for the evaluation of the efficiency of sorption, the prospects for the application of a humate-containing product in relation to industrially polluted waters.