Environmental Products Market--Green Is Better and Getting Bigger : Ecology: Business looks good at Christmastime. And many see even better days ahead under the Clinton Adminstration.

The ultimate environmental Christmas still eludes the Maxwell-Smith family of North Hollywood--but it’s not for lack of effort.

They make their own gifts and wrap them in old road maps or cloth--the upshot of 20 years of recycling. Their 2-year-old live Christmas tree will serve one more season before they donate it as shade for recuperating animals at the Wildlife Waystation in Lakeview Terrace. Last year, neighbors presented them with a coffee cup--ceramic, not polystyrene--dedicated to the “Eco-Saints of Agnes Avenue.”

Two decades into the modern environmental movement, families such as the Maxwell-Smiths have made ecology part of their everyday life, becoming minimalist consumers in the process--even at the holidays.

“Christmas as a consumer event, we see mostly as hype,” said Melinda Maxwell-Smith, 44, a yoga teacher and massage therapist.

The Maxwell-Smiths may remain a challenge. Yet for today’s crop of “green” retailers, Christmas is more than ever a consumer event.

In the last five years, except for a troubling stall in the first half of 1992, business has been good. Indeed, the environmental products market continues to grow, despite the dour economy and recent controversies over the accuracy of some companies’ claims that their products are environmentally superior to competing goods.

For environmentally conscious shoppers, there is a larger selection of goods this year than in seasons past. And most green merchants are predicting solid holiday gains.

“There will always be a segment of the population that will find endless satisfaction in things,” said Joel Makower, editor of the Green Consumer Letter in Washington, D.C.

Shoppers will find that the world of green goods and services has gone well beyond humble unbleached toilet paper.

Alongside its $19 solar charger for hearing-aid batteries, Real Goods Trading Corp.--a Ukiah, Calif.-based catalogue retailer that bills itself as the world’s largest supplier of alternative energy and environmentally “sensible” products--now offers an item more likely found in a Neiman Marcus catalogue. The $40,000 Solar Sultan’s Package allows the buyer to be “fully empowered by the sun.” It includes a 30-foot yurt (a kind of tent), electric pickup truck and scooter, various environmentally benign appliances and a wood-fired hot-tub heater.

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Hammacher Schlemmer, another catalogue dealer, sells a golf cap ventilated by a solar-powered fan. Golfers also can purchase Kmart’s popular Bio-Tee, a water-soluble golf tee made from recycled waste paper and plant byproducts.

The environmental group Greenpeace has opened a new store at the Beverly Connection, featuring items such as unbleached cotton T-shirts, cosmetics packaged in recyclable glass instead of plastic, wooden toys and compact discs of rain forest sounds.

Heal the Bay, a local environmental group, has just opened two stores--in the Westside Pavilion and the South Bay Galleria--offering recycled-glass jewelry from the beach and other goods.

For the perplexed shopper, Fred Siegel’s for a Better Ecology--a Santa Monica mall that sells only environmental products--maintains an Ecology Information Center hot line.

One must be careful, after all. Green gifts may not always be what they seem.

For instance, a membership in the Sea Lion Legal Defense Fund in Kodiak, Alaska, would actually help fund a lobbying group of the state’s pollock fishermen, who are better known for shooting endangered Steller sea lions--with whom they compete for fish--than saving them.

Green retailers say confusion in the marketplace over claims of biodegradability, recyclability or other sorts of Earth-friendliness slowed sales earlier this year. One highly publicized case involved a lawsuit filed in 1990 by officials in seven states against the maker of Hefty trash bags. The suit contended that the trash bags, when buried in a landfill, did not biodegrade. A year later, the company agreed to delete the label’s claims that the bags were “degradable.”

For the first six months of 1992, environmental consumer products made up 11.5% of all new products introduced in the United States, down from 12.7% in the same period in 1991, according to a study by Marketing Intelligence Service in Naples, N.Y.

But most observers expect the environmental products market to gain strength in 1993, now that the Federal Trade Commission has issued guidelines for green labeling. The market could also get a boost from a Clinton Administration that is expected to place more emphasis on environmental matters and from a recent upswing in consumer confidence.

“People had started to think, ‘Oh, that green thing is all a bunch of hooey, and (the products) don’t work anyway,’ ” said Jonathan Radigan, spokesman for Seventh Generation, a Colchester, Vt., mail-order company that sells “Products for a Healthy Planet.”

Radigan has stepped up the company’s efforts to demonstrate that green goods perform as well as traditional brands. “We’ve started to let our customers know this, with charts and having independent laboratories research our products,” he said. Sales are expected to reach $8 million this year, up from $7.5 million in 1991; December sales should be up more than 30% from a year ago. *

But who’s buying these items, if the Maxwell-Smiths aren’t?

“It ranges from the obvious tree hugger to the not-so-obvious suburbanite who wants to do things a bit differently,” Green Consumer Editor Makower said. “I think there’s a certain amount of guilt-assuaging going on here. . . . People say, ‘I’m not doing much the rest of the year, so at least let me give gifts that have some tinge of green.’ ”

Melinda Maxwell-Smith does not settle for a tinge.

“You have to keep questioning,” she said. “It’s hard to keep abreast of the latest information.”

Over the years, her family has learned to cut water and electricity use in half and has built a back-yard compost pile. In the garage are separate containers for non-corrugated cardboard, glossy paper, non-glossy colored and plain paper, polystyrene foam, pill-bottle plastics and plastic grocery bags.

And this year, the family will give neighbors note paper decorated with nontoxic-ink impressions from the bottom of a celery bunch--a renewable resource which, in cross-section, resembles a rose.

Mark Maxwell-Smith, 45, a television game show producer, was converted by his wife. He now irons most of his own shirts instead of sending them to a commercial laundry and avoids buying clothing that must be dry-cleaned.

“Mark has come a long way from believing that flowers grow in the middle of a bar mitzvah table,” Melinda says.

Daughters Mosa, 16--a “vegan” (one who does not eat animal meat or use products made from animals)--and Megan, 12, carry their lunches to school in reusable cloth sacks.

“We’re not the Waltons,” Mark insisted. “We don’t sit around making rag dolls.”

Still, as the green marketers point out, every family has basic needs. “I’d like to get a composting toilet,” Melinda said recently.

Those run about $1,100, from the Real Goods catalogue.