The development of sustainable adsorbent materials for removing pollutants from water is of great interest for environmental remediation and human safety. This work presents the beneficial use of cassava rhizome (CR) to produce economical and efficient carbonaceous adsorbents for dye removal. CR derived activated carbons (AC) and magnetic AC were fabricated by one-pot hydrothermal carbonization in the presence of ZnCl2 and ZnCl2/FeCl3 respectively, followed by pyrolysis at 800 °C. Porosity tuning and degree of magnetization of as-prepared carbons were achieved by varying the amount of ZnCl2 and FeCl3 as an activating agent and source of magnetic particles respectively. The result indicated that the optimal condition to obtain ACs with a high SBET (1405 m2/g) and the largest mesopore volume (0.54 cm3/g) was using the weight ratio of ZnCl2 to CR of 3 (3AC). While, the magnetic mesoporous carbon with the highest SBET (554 m2/g) was yielded when addition of FeCl3 into the reaction mixture with a FeCl3 to ZnCl2 weight ratio of 1(3AC-1M). 3AC and 3AC-1M were tested as adsorbents to investigate the adsorption efficiency of methylene blue (MB) in water. The adsorption behavior of MB on 3AC and 3AC-1M were monolayer adsorption based on the Langmuir isotherm model with R2 of 0.9993 and 0.9953, respectively. 3AC showed the MB adsorption capacity of 274 mg/g which is comparable to that of commercial ACs. 3AC-1M that adsorbs MB with the maximum capacity of 102 mg/g, was separated from aqueous solution easily using an external magnet. This study demonstrates that the carbon precursors from biomass waste as CR can be conveniently converted into efficient carbonaceous adsorbents and functionalized for example by adding magnetic properties into the carbon structure to enable manipulations in industrial operations.