PHUKET: Shopper sentiment on Phuket remains in favor of plastic bags and the environmental campaigners who wish to ban them have a long struggle ahead.

Although yesterday's declaration in Phuket City with Phuket Governor Tri Augkaradacha that 43 local government and private sector groups have signed a pledge to rid Phuket of the plastic scourge is positive, the process is likely to take several years, not months.

Shoppers in at least one large Phuket retail outlet continue to show a preference for plastic bags, Phuketwan has been told by a senior marketing official.

''We won't be attempting to force customers to try switch to a system when they don't yet understand the benefits of making the change,'' the marketing official said.

Cloth bags on sale in Tesco-Lotus supermarket at the Phuket City checkout at 69 baht each were not exactly flying off the shelves yesterday.

Even if thousands are ready to be given away for free, we predict there will not be many takers for a while yet.

Although the bag-the-bag campaign has Phuketwan's wholehearted support, shoppers will never embrace the need to give up their addiction to plastic until the reasons why it has to happen are fully explained.

This requires a huge and efficient promotional and educational campaign, and we've seen no sign of that as yet.

Some westerners especially seem to think their understanding of the environmental damage caused by plastic has been inherited. It hasn't.

Thousands of media reports over many years have contributed to the average city-dwelling expat's understanding of the evils of plastic, why it has to go and why habits must change.

That awareness has not been instilled in Phuket people, or more broadly in Thailand. Change for a better future won't happen unless huge amounts of time and energy are devoted to informing people why the habits of decades have to alter.

The plastic bag has enriched the lives of most Phuketians. It means a hands-free existence, except when shopping.

The p. bag not only comes when you need it, with the purchased goods, it's also great for filling up with rubbish and disposed of effortlessly.

Who cares what happens once the rubbish truck carts the trash off to the tip, where it simply vanishes?

Telling people who think this way that they have to expend effort in bringing their own bags, in renouncing those wonderful free garbage containers, and in becoming aware of where their rubbish goes, is a tall, tall order.

There are parallels, one of them most appropriate. For decades when riding motorcycles, Phuket people failed to wear helmets on their heads.

Only with a painstaking strategy mapped out by former Phuket City Police Chief Colonel Wanchai Eakpornpit did the prospect of change become real.

Colonel Wanchai spent visit after visit enlisting local leaders, talking to headmasters, doing deals with schools and motorcycle taxi riders, making a movie, and implementing a carefully targetted awareness campaign.

There's that word again, a-w-a-r-e-n-e-s-s. Without it, the campaign to beat plastic is a dead duck. Awareness is what the bag-the-bag campaign needs.

The positive is that it's only a generation or two at the most since Phuket people abandoned their superb packaging habits because the plastic alternative was simply too available it proved impossible to resist.

There was a time when a coconut with a couple of carrying strings constituted an organic way of carrying drinking liquid, and banana leaves wrapped virtually all food.

Phuket now needs to step backwards to move forwards. I'd love to see Governor Tri on billboards endorsing the coconut drink carrier and the banana leaf as world's best food container.

Phuketwan would be delighted to have Phuket leaders at all levels endorse a ''Phuket, Naturally'' campaign. The message applies to the beaches and the reefs and the hills, as well as shopping and garbage disposal.

Until that big message has been extensively taught and is fully understood by everyone on Phuket, the truth is that plastic will continue to seem fantastic.