As a kind of special industrial raw materials, porous minerals and rocks have been playing more and more important roles in the environmental remediation materials and are arousing great interest among mineralogists. Based on the dimensions, structures, shapes of the pores and the surface components of the porous minerals and rocks, this paper has summed up characteristics of typical porous minerals and rocks such as attapulgite, montmorillonite, sepiolite, zeolite and diatomite, and evaluated their application as filters, sorbents, ion exchangers and catalysts in environmental engineering.