One More Plastic Bag
Westford, MA
2022, Junior, Performing Arts
Verse 1:
Let me tell you all about
The life of something we’ve all seen around
The plastic bag
It all starts in a factory
Where pellets of polyethylene
Are melted
To make… well a plastic bag
From there all of these bags
Are sent over to a store
Where someone
Maybe you!
Uses them to carry food back home
And when they’re done they just throw the bags away thinking
Chorus:
It’s just one more plastic bag
Just another one that I can throw away
It’s just one more plastic bag
Not like one more’s gonna matter anyways
But we know all about the lives that we hurt and yet
It’s still just one more plastic bag, but it’s gotta go away
Verse 2:
Alright so now your plastic bag
Is with its friends in another trash bag which… by the way… is plastic
(why am I not surprised)
Now this is where things start to divide
Recycling gives them new ways to thrive
But landfills (What do landfills do?)
Let them sit there
But, some of these plastic bags
End up in the sea
Strangling living creatures
That are alive that you and me
But plastic bags don’t decompose and they stay here for a thousand years
Chorus:
It’s just one more plastic bag
Just another one that I can throw away
It’s just one more plastic bag
Not like one more’s gonna matter anyways
But we know all about the lives that we hurt and now
Chorus (Altered)
It’s not just one more plastic bag
Not just one that we can simply throw away
It’s not just one more plastic bag
One more’s gonna matter and it’ll make a change
Cause we know all about the lives that we hurt and now
It’s not just one more plastic bag
Not just one that we can simply throw away
It’s not just one more plastic bag
One more’s gonna matter and it’ll make a change
Cause’ we know all about the lives that we hurt and now
It’s not just one more plastic bag
It’s not just one more plastic bag
Reflection
Reflection
Writing about the life cycle of a plastic bag is actually quite interesting, simply because of the multiple paths that it could end up taking. As I wrote this song, I definitely learned a lot about those individual paths, and how it affected wildlife and us humans alike. For me, the most important thing about this song was that it brought an immense amount of awareness to my daily lifestyle, as I realized that I was actually using many more plastic bags than I thought. Simply raising this awareness, and feeling the guilt every time I saw a plastic bag of groceries by the door, made me realize that plastic bags have a much bigger impact than they seem to have. There are so many people that think “one more won’t make a difference” because there are already so many plastic bags in the oceans. I know this because I used to be one of those people. But what I have learned, and what I hope this song emphasizes, is that one more will eventually turn into a million, and it will continuously pollute our oceans.