With the advantage of fast, sensitive, inexpensive, nondestructive measurement, magnetic methods can be used as a preliminary method of studying pollution effects before starting timeconsuming and expensive chemical methods. Magnetic parameters such as lowfield magnetic susceptibility also can provide a proxy method of estimating increased pollution of different environmental systems. With more and more attention paid to environmental pollution problems, magnetic methods have been widely used and fast developed since the environmental magnetism was founded about 20 years ago. Recently, magnetic methods have been popularly applied to environmental pollution research, especially heavy metals contamination investigation in Europe. Lots of researches were done and plenty of experience was gained in reconstructing pollution history, monitoring present environmental pollution, tracing and separating the sources of pollution.
 In this paper, the advantages, principles and purposes of the magnetic methods are introduced. Some examples of different environmental systems, such as atmosphere, river, lake, harbor, coastal bank and so on, are given to prove the availability and effect of magnetic methods. A new soilprofile kappameter SM400, which enables continuous realtime measurements directly in the field, and a pocketsize magnetic susceptibility meter SM30, which can measure sediments and rocks with extremely low level of magnetic susceptibility, are also reported in this paper as new instruments. Some difficult and key problems are analyzed and summarized, such as how to interpret magnetic mechanism, how to explain the correlation between magnetic parameters and heavy metals, how to separate individual pollution source from multiple pollutions, how to get meaningful magnetic signal from intensive anthropogenic activities. However, to develop well, new methods must be used to analyze and interpret the magnetic data and other related subjects must be imported to environmental magnetism.