The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is calling for urgent action to address Ireland's rising waste volumes and falling recycling rates.
It comes as a newly published report shows significant waste increase across all sectors.
The official data for 2019 showed increases in municipal, packaging and hazardous waste, and increase in the volume of construction waste by 2.6 million tonnes to 8.8 million tonnes.
Waste from households and businesses rose by 6% to 3.1 million tonnes.
The report notes a dramatic change in waste management over the past decade with municipal waste sent for incineration with energy recovery rising from 4 to 46%.
Ireland is facing a much wider gap to meet ambitious EU recycling targets for 2025 onwards, Mary Frances Rochford, programme manager with the EPA, said.
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Ms Rochford said a "considerable amount" of waste is generated from households, and what is especially concerning is the amount of packaging waste, which she said increased by 11% in 2019.
"We also see that this waste generation is very much linked to our economic growth," she said.
"So as we're making more money, we're spending more money, we're consuming more products, and we're seeing that then in terms of the waste that we're generating."
Ireland is currently meeting all its targets, but there are "some ambitious changes" in EU recycling targets from 2025 to 2030, and packaging is of particular concern, Ms Rochford said.
She said the rate of packaging recycling was 62% in 2019 and they need to get to 70% by 2030.
Plastic packaging was 28%, she said, and they need to get to 50% by 2025 and 55% by 2030.
She urged consumers to separate waste into the appropriate bin.
"We can have a policy and that's very important, but at an individual level we see that better segregation - putting what can be recycled into a recycling bin, putting our food waste into a food waste bin - can really have a huge impact in relation to our recycling waste," Ms Rochford said.
