Figures Abstract In the process of urban kitchen waste sorting, robots often encounter issues such as slipping and empty grabs when attempting to grasp dirty waste objects like plastic bottles and glass bottles. This paper proposes a garbage grasping framework based on the Channel Exchange Generative Residual Inference Network (CE-GR-NET), which synthesizes optimal grasping trajectories through the fusion of hierarchical visual features. The object detection network identifies and locates recyclable bottles among solid waste, while CE-GR-NET uses RGB and depth images to generate grasping points for plastic recyclable bottles. Experimental results show that, on the Cornell Grasping Dataset, the proposed method achieves good inference performance and fast inference speed in single-object solid waste scenarios, ultimately generating grasping boxes for plastic recyclable bottles in RGB images. On the self-constructed multi-source urban kitchen waste images, the proposed method generates grasping boxes for targets and regresses the corresponding object categories simultaneously, achieving an image-based model accuracy of 96.03%, an object-based model accuracy of 94.40%, and a grasping object classification accuracy of 97.87%. Citation: Xiao X, Liu D, Qin H (2026) A grasp point generation algorithm for waste handling based on a generative reasoning network. PLoS One 21(5): e0349864. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0349864 Editor: Marco Antonio Moreno-Armendariz, Instituto Politecnico Nacional, MEXICO Received: November 15, 2025; Accepted: May 6, 2026; Published: May 29, 2026 Copyright: © 2026 Xiao et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper. Funding: This work was supported in part by the Project of the Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation (2026JJ90097), the Scientific Research Fund of Hunan Provincial Education Department (25A0672), and the Research and Practice of the