An overview of the datasets.

As industrialization and the development of smart cities progress, effective waste collection, classification, and management have become increasingly vital. Recycling processes depend on accurately identifying and restoring waste materials to their original states, essential for reducing pollution and promoting environmental sustainability. In recent years, deep learning (DL) techniques have been applied strategically to enhance waste management processes, including capturing, classifying, composting, and disposing of waste. In light of the current context, the study presents an innovative waste classification model that utilizes a tailored DenseNet201 architecture coupled with an integrated Squeeze and Excitation (SE) attention mechanism and the fusion of parallel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) branches. The integration of SE attention enables squeezing the irrelevant features and excites the important ones and the fusion of parallel CNN branches enhances the extraction of intricate, deeper, and more distinguishable features from waste data. The evaluation of the model across four publicly available datasets, along with three additional datasets to enhance waste diversity and the model’s reliability, and the incorporation of Grad-CAM to visualize and interpret the model’s focus areas for transparent decision-making, confirms its effectiveness in improving waste management practices. Furthermore, this model’s successful deployment in a web-based sorting system marks a tangible stride in translating theoretical advancements into on-the-ground implementation, promising heightened efficiency and scalability in waste management practices. This work presents a precise solution for adaptable waste classification, heralding a paradigm shift in global waste disposal norms.