The Big Bucket: An IoT Cloud Solution For Smart Waste Management in Smart Cities

Research and industries are devoting a great effort in getting cities and communities smarter, thus to improve citizens' Quality of Life (QoL) and paying serious attention to e-government and e-inclusion processes. 
This is a strategic but also very complex objective that involves both governance and citizens to address many challenges. 
Following this line, this paper discusses the necessity for new smart waste management systems and presents a comprehensive state of the art on the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) for smart waste recycling. 
In particular, we present and argue the Big Bucket IoT Cloud environment, where smart dumpsters are equipped with low-cost sensors and open source easy-to-use hardware and software. Its architectural model is discussed and compared with other existing solutions in the future perspective.