The Marine Conservation Society said plastic was a major feature as 16% more litter was picked up than in 2015.
It wants people to pay up to 10p extra when they buy a drink and they will get it back when they return the bottle.
It also wants takeaway containers to be compostable but opponents said the plans would not work.
"With a deposit return scheme, you pay a deposit on a bottle - equivalent to 5p or 10p - and you get it back when you return to a reverse vending machine in a shop," said Gill Bell, Wales conservation manager for the Marine Conservation Society (MCS).
"It's up to you to return the bottle so you would get your deposit back."
"A deposit return scheme [DRS] would work in Wales and we would like the Welsh Government to look at it."
Ms Bell highlighted the success of the 5p levy on plastic carrier bags and said DRS has been successful in other countries such as Germany along with parts of United States and Australia.
Scotland is examining whether to introduce DRS.
However, Jane Bickerstaffe, director of the the Industry Council for Research on Packaging and the Environment is against the move.
She said: "A deposit is a tax in effect.
"You'd have to have a system in place in shops which costs money to run and repair, leaving unintended consequences for the consumer.
"They are financially expensive ways to address just a small part of the problem."
The Welsh Government has been asked to comment.
Other measures MCS wants to see is takeaway containers to be compostable and people to choose more carefully what they are buying in shops when it comes to packaging.
Ms Bell added: "It's about empowering people to do their little bit at home. They can reduce the amount of plastic and packaging they buy."
But Ms Bickerstaffe has a different approach.
"Sometimes the criticism is litter because a few people can't be bothered to put the packaging in a bin so it ends up in the street," she added.
"Litter is a growing problem and one that all of us need to tackle. That's why INCPEN is supporting a new approach called Neat Streets.
"It aims to make everyone proud of their environment so they don't litter anything - till receipts, cups, crisp bags, fishing nets, newspapers, gum, cigarette ends or anything else.
"Unless a place is properly cleaned, it just gets dirty again because even one piece of litter makes people think it's OK to add more."

The muppet was donated by creator Jim Henson's widow Jane, along with nine other characters from the 1955 TV show Sam and Friends.
Some of the other muppets in the collection include early versions of Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch.
Henson's oldest puppet, Pierre the French Rat, was also donated.
Jane Henson said the original characters provided five minutes of fun each night after the local news where they mostly mimed to popular music.
"I think people realized that if you put Kermit's face up there, it was just as powerful - we were mostly just doing it to entertain ourselves," she said.
The Smithsonian already has a familiar Kermit the Frog puppet made famous on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show.
But the original Kermit looked more like a lizard, made with ping-pong ball eyes and green felt from an old coat thrown out by Henson's mother.
Museum curator Dwight Blocker Bowers said the muppets would be a boon for the museum's collection.
"It certainly shows the muppets at the beginning of the career of a large family of entertainers," he said. "More than anything, I think it shows the genius of Jim Henson."
Bowers said the museum plans to have the original muppets on display by November in the pop culture gallery.
The Hensons are also to give the Smithsonian more puppets in the years to come, possibly including a Miss Piggy to join her amphibian boyfriend.
The amount of litter on Welsh beaches has risen prompting calls for a deposit scheme to be introduced on bottles, cans and cartons.
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The original Kermit the Frog has been donated to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington.