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Plastics are everywhere we look. While plastic plays a major role in the global economy, rising environmental concerns have created an imperative to regulate plastic materials. In 2018, the European Commission published the European Union (EU) plastics strategy, a first-of-its-kind targeting plastic as a ‘policy object’external to other legislation. Part of its action plan is the so-called Single-Use Plastics (SUP) Directive, which focuses on ten selected plastic objects—those most commonly found on European beaches. However, under close scrutiny, plastic seems to be anything but a clear-cut regulatory category. In this paper, we investigate how plastic manifests as an EU policy object through and for the SUP Directive. We follow the SUP Directive and the assemblage of ‘plastic policy objects’ through the regulatory spaces of the European Commission and the European Parliament. In these regulatory spaces,‘plastic policy objects’ are assembled in specific ways that raise questions regarding their ontological politics. The paper is based on analyses of EU documents (directives, impact assessments, working documents, reports) and minutes of debates in EU parliament, as well as participations in stakeholder events.