Zn (II) is one the common pollutant among heavy metals found in industrial effluents. Removal of pollutant from industrial effluents can be accomplished by various techniques, out of which adsorption was found to be an efficient method. Applications of adsorption limits itself due to high cost of adsorbent. In this regard, a low cost adsorbent produced from palm oil kernel shell based agricultural waste is examined for its efficiency to remove Zn (II) from waste water and aqueous solution. The influence of independent process variables like initial concentration, pH, residence time, activated carbon (AC) dosage and process temperature on the removal of Zn (II) by palm kernel shell based AC from batch adsorption process are studied systematically. Based on the design of experimental matrix, 50 experimental runs are performed with each process variable in the experimental range. The optimal values of process variables to achieve maximum removal efficiency is studied using response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural network (ANN) approaches. A quadratic model, which consists of first order and second order degree regressive model is developed using the analysis of variance and RSM - CCD framework. The particle swarm optimization which is a meta-heuristic optimization is embedded on the ANN architecture to optimize the search space of neural network. The optimized trained neural network well depicts the testing data and validation data with R2 equal to 0.9106 and 0.9279 respectively. The outcomes indicates that the superiority of ANN-PSO based model predictions over the quadratic model predictions provided by RSM. Display omitted •Palm oil kernels based activated carbon as low cost agricultural adsorbent for zinc removal•Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) embedded with artificial neural network (ANN) algorithm for search space•Novel approach to model and optimize the pollutant removal by ANN-PSO integration•Optimization of process variables for maximum removal of pollutant by Response Surface methodology (RSM)