Less than a third of Ireland's plastic packaging waste is being recycled, according to recent figures from the Environmental Protection Agency.
It also found that the overall recycling rate for packaging waste fell by 4% in 2021.
On the banks of the River Boyne, in Co Meath, plastic packaging waste is a problem that just will not go away.
James Murray is the owner Boyne Valley Activities, which is located beside the river. He said plastic has to be picked up on a regular basis.
"We're on the water all the time so we can see that a lot of rubbish is going into the river, and we do clean it on a regular basis with the Tidy Towns," he said.
"We keep it clean as much as we can, but the issue is everything's getting blown into the river regardless, people don't throw it specifically into the water, it gets blown out of from bins, so it seems to end up in the river and then ends up in the sea.
"Single-use plastics are just a nightmare. We've been chatting about it here, like even here in the coffee dock, it's going to be so hard to get rid of them. There are plastic bags and packaging around everything, but we must start somewhere," Mr Murray added.
Speaking to RTÉ's This Week programme, Mr Murray said he has banned single-use plastics at the activity centre and coffee dock.
"It has made an awful lot of difference to the to the rubbish bins straight away. If they're not here we can't put them into the bins," Mr Murray said.
The amount of plastic packaging waste has prompted people in Trim to set up the 'Sick of Plastic Group'.
"We've set it up this summer in response to just a real worry about the level of single use and disposable plastic that we're producing," said Michael Breen, chairperson of the Sick of Plastic group.
"There was a clean up here last weekend involving Trim Tidy Tows and several other local groups.
"They do it on a regular basis along the riverbank and they picked up quite a few bags of rubbish, drink cans and food, packages and things like that.
"It always tends to be mainly food and drink packages. I know they came back with, after a couple of hours, 15 full bags of waste."
Mr Breen said litter is not an issue in the town, adding that it won the Tidy Towns last year, but plastic waste still ends up in the river.
"The town is very clean, but there is an issue with people coming down here maybe at weekends and at night, having a couple of drinks or whatever it may be, but the plastic ends up in the river," he said.
"Trim has got great amenities, but we don't have recycling bins in the town, it's just litter bins so I think a lot of it is getting into the waste stream rather than being recycled even though I think a lot of people really do make the effort to recycle properly and to sort and separate their recycle items," Michael Breen said.
One shop that is encouraging people to reuse rather than recycle is Cult Zero based in Trim town.
"There's nothing wrong with the plastic bottle for your washing up liquid, but you could get that plastic bottle refilled over and over again. It still takes energy to recycle, so it is better to reuse as much as possible," Rachel Waldron, who works at Cult Zero said.
The Environmental Protection Agency says this is the fifth year in a row where we've seen an increase in plastic packaging waste.
The EPA said that while the quantity of packaging waste being recycled is increasing every year, it cannot keep up with the total increase in packaging waste being generated in the first place.
"We've generated in 2021, over 1.2 million tons of packaging waste and that's a clear trend over the last five years of continued growth.
"What we're seeing now is that our growth is starting to undermine our efforts to try and recycle as much of this material as possible." said Warren Phelan, programme manager for the Circular Economy programme in the Environmental Protection Agency said.
"For example, what we're seeing is that the consumption or the growth of packaging is happening three times quicker than it is that we're recycling so our overall packaging recycling rate has actually declined in 2020.
"Our target for 2025 is certainly now at risk."
Mr Phelan said that the focus needs to be on manufactures, and not consumers, and called on bigger retailers to "show leaderships" and "see where the opportunities are to change the current situation," Warren Phelan said.
