A lightweight Yolov5 garbage detection solution was proposed aiming at the issue of poor real-time performance in garbage detection classification on edge devices. The Stem module was introduced to enhance the model’s ability to extract features from input images. The C3 module of the backbone was improved to increase feature extraction capabilities. Depthwise separable convolution was used to replace the 3×3 downsampling convolutions in the network, achieving model lightweighting. The K-means++ algorithm was employed to recompute anchor box values for objects, enabling the model to better predict target box sizes during training. Experimental research and comparisons show that the improved model achieves a 0.8% increase in mAP_0.5 and a 3% increase in mAP_0.5:0.95, while reducing model parameters by 77.9% and improving inference speed by 21.9% compared with the Yolov5s model, significantly enhancing the detection performance of the model.