The plastic bag is an object that embodies the essence of the ecological challenge of our time. The bag is a key example of the surplus and wasteful manufacturing of late capitalism, and also constitutes a serious ecological hazard because of its long decomposition time, during which it wanders through sub-marine ecologies. In this essay the plastic bag serves as a point of departure for a new materialist discussion of plastic. The essay wishes to show how the concepts of plastic, including the plastic bag, only as an artificial element that reaches the boundary of virgin nature, actually preserves a reductive distinction between nature and culture. That distinction continues to alienate humans from their environment (that abstract “nature”), and thereby preserves what it calls “the plastic problem.” At the expense of that concept, the essay wonders whether plastic may also offer the potential to understand the present time. Borrowing principles from the thought of Catherine Malabou, plastic is therefore transformed from a foreign object to a material channel which can be experimented with, thought about and referred to without separating humans from nature or humans from plastic.