Eco Expo to Offer World of Choices : Ecology: Spring consumer show's organizer plans nation's first comprehensive look at everything environmental--from solar houses to thermostats.

By CONNIE KOENENN

Jan. 20, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Most environmental converts change their lives in little ways: recycling newspapers, turning off the tap while brushing their teeth or car-pooling.

Movie producer Marc Merson changed his life in a great big way. He put his career on hold to organize the first national environmental consumer trade show. Eco Expo will open April 12-14 at the Los Angeles Convention Center and then move on to Denver, New York and Atlanta.

Designed as a cross between a home show and Disney’s EPCOT Center, Eco Expo will provide the first comprehensive look at hundreds of environmental products.

Merson wants to assemble, under one roof, every environmental product and service available:

“We’re going to have major pavilions for transportation, energy, home, garden and recycling. There is radical new stuff being developed in all these fields.”

The spadework, he says, has been prodigious. With no model to work from, he has tracked down leads from environmental magazines, newsletters and research centers--with the zeal of an ecological detective.

“These products are just springing up all over the place,” he says. “Two years ago, this show wouldn’t have been possible. The turning point in terms of public consciousness was Earth Day (1990).”

Sitting in his Sherman Oaks office complex, which occupies the second floor of a boxy gray stucco building on Ventura Boulevard, Merson talks animatedly about his new project. The organization is adding people and phone lines as Eco Expo activity picks up, he says. “We’re getting about 40 calls a day from ads we recently ran in Garbage and Buzzworm and E magazines. Right now we have about 200 exhibitors signed up, and a mailing list of 4,500 environmental companies.”

Those figures represent a groundswell of “green market” activity, with everybody from major corporations to start-up cottage industries producing a stream of new products--all clamoring to be environmentally pure. For the consumer, Merson says, the result can be chaotic.

“You can’t go shopping for an appliance or hot water heater or cooling system right now without finding a big discrepancy between the most and the least energy-efficient models,” Merson says. “In water conservation, there are at least five kinds of low-flush toilets.

“Eventually, it will weed itself out. But the service we want to offer with Eco Expo is to bring the public together with the whole array of products.”

Merson, a New Yorker who moved his Brownstone Productions to Los Angeles 13 years ago, wants to excite people about the possibilities of environmental living.

“It shouldn’t be dutiful,” he says. Indeed, Merson describes his new job as “a lot of fun.

“The most amazing thing in this field is the speed with which it’s developing. Look at this!” Rummaging in a closet, Merson produces a swatch of luxury carpet made from 100% recycled plastic, another recycled plastic sample for an ice chest, and a set of sturdy office file folders made from recycled paper.

“Four months ago none of this existed. It’s like the computer revolution was five years ago.”

He talks about a new grass that requires 40% less water than traditional varieties, and recycled plastic playground equipment that looks like redwood.

“And there is some radical new stuff--glass insulation that is five times as thermally efficient as glass used to be, and a whole range of solar heating and photovoltaics that are constantly getting more energy out of less material.”

Similarly, he is finding auto choices starting to range from gasoline-efficient cars to electric-battery models and a few solar-powered cars.

Merson says Eco Expo will offer options--as large as a solar house for those committing to a major lifestyle change or as small as a new thermostat that will reduce energy consumption by 30%.

He has been invited to preview the show at Advertising Age’s first “Green Summit” Jan. 29 in New York. The magazine, considered the bible of the advertising-marketing world, has invited dozens of experts for a daylong examination of the emerging field of green marketing.

“There is so much happening, we want to try and put it into perspective,” said Ad Age staffer Meryl Suben. The summit’s lineup spans the field from environmentalists to marketers.

“Marc Merson is talking directly to the consumer, so we invited him to bring a sampling of the cutting-edge products he’s finding for his show,” Suben said.

Others, too, give Merson good marks for trying to move alternative technology from the rarefied world of scientists and environmental purists into everyday life.

“I think he is a visionary in bringing this to the people level,” said the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Richard Green, an authority on alternative- and renewable-energy systems. “Until recently, the new technology has been confined to laboratories and research institutes. Now Eco Expo is saying, ‘You guys who have been so frustrated about what is going on. Here is what you can do, the systems you can purchase.’ ”

And former associate Mary Proteau, a producer and environmental activist, says Merson “takes the environmental stuff out of a little cranny of people with compost heaps under their arms and puts into a perspective where people say ‘I can do this--this is about the real world.’ ”

Actor-environmentalist John Ratzenberger agrees: “I think the timing (of Eco Expo) is important. We liked the word disposable so much we find that’s what we are doing to our civilization, and we’re starting to realize it won’t work.”

Ratzenberger, who plays Cliff the postman on NBC’s “Cheers,” is real-life president of Eco-Pack Industries, which manufactures a biodegradable, recyclable packing material. The business has “just exploded,” he said.

“I don’t want to use the word hip, but when people receive something in recycled paper these days, they feel good about it.”

Ratzenberger said today’s consumers are more sensitive to environmental considerations: “Everybody you talk to wants to change.”

That’s what Merson is counting on, he says.

“We think people should know all this stuff is going on,” he says. “Our job is to give the consumer a choice, whether they want to make a small change or a radical change in the way they live.”