Smart waste management and air pollution forecasting: Harnessing Internet of things and fully Elman neural network

As the Internet of things (IoT) continues to transform modern technologies, innovative applications in waste management and air pollution monitoring are becoming critical for sustainable development. In this manuscript, a novel smart waste management (SWM) and air pollution forecasting (APF) system is proposed by leveraging IoT sensors and the fully Elman neural network (FENN) model, termed as SWM–APF–IoT–FENN. The system integrates real-time data from waste and air quality sensors including weight, trash level, odour and carbon monoxide (CO) that are collected from smart bins connected to a Google Cloud Server. Here, the MaxAbsScaler is employed for data normalization, ensuring consistent feature representation. Subsequently, the atmospheric contaminants surrounding the waste receptacles were observed using a FENN model. This model is utilized to predict the atmospheric concentration of CO and categorize the bin status as filled, half-filled and unfilled. Moreover, the weight parameter of the FENN model is tuned using the secretary bird optimization algorithm for better prediction results. The implementation of the proposed methodology is done in Python tool, and the performance metrics are analysed. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in performance, achieving 15.65%, 18.45% and 21.09% higher accuracy, 18.14%, 20.14% and 24.01% higher F-Measure, 23.64%, 24.29% and 29.34% higher False Acceptance Rate (FAR), 25.00%, 27.09% and 31.74% higher precision, 20.64%, 22.45% and 28.64% higher sensitivity, 26.04%, 28.65% and 32.74% higher specificity, 9.45%, 7.38% and 4.05% reduced computational time than the conventional approaches such as Elman neural network, recurrent artificial neural network and long short-term memory with gated recurrent unit, respectively. Thus, the proposed method offers a streamlined, efficient framework for real-time waste management and pollution forecasting, addressing critical environmental challenges.