Smart city waste management has become a central management and planning challenge as municipalities confront rapid urbanisation, rising waste loads, infrastructure constraints, and the need for data-driven public services. This article presents a structured review of the smart city waste management literature and interprets the findings through an Enablers–Barriers–Practices–Opportunities (EBPO) framework. The review is based on a Scopus-derived corpus of 332 English-language journal articles identified through a structured search, screening, and thematic-mapping process focused on Industry 4.0 technologies, smart city systems, and waste management. The analysis synthesizes the managerial conditions that support implementation, the operational and institutional barriers that constrain adoption, the currently reported digital practices, and the strategic opportunities that emerge for city governance and service redesign. Three thematic knowledge domains dominate the literature: smart waste management, transportation and decision-making, and sustainable solid waste management. The review shows that successful smart city waste systems depend not only on digital infrastructure and sensing technologies, but also on regulatory readiness, interoperability, workforce capability, data governance, and cross-sector coordination. By translating a technically fragmented literature into a management-oriented synthesis, the article offers a coherent basis for policy design, service planning, investment prioritization, and future scholarly work on digitally enabled municipal systems.