In recent years, the waste management and recycling industry has been facing multiple challenges such as protecting the public from harmful hazardous waste, promoting recycling and material source separation into common material streams. For instance, separating waste of hazardous wastes such as paint or batteries can be costly during the source separation process after waste is collected. What is therefore needed is a smart waste management system that is capable of identifying waste materials prior to the separation process. To overcome these challenges and more, we introduce recycle.io, a serverless Internet of Things (IoT) architecture for smart waste management systems. Using recycle.io, it is then possible to determine in real-time the types of source material violations prior to the waste collection. In this manner, waste management systems can identify sources of violations and rectify this by bringing awareness to the public or issuing fines to prevent violations from occurring. We demonstrate usefulness of our approach throughout the paper. © 2018 IEEE.