A Baby Step for Ecology : Environment: A Malibu mother, determined to stop using disposables, wins her campaign to get a diaper service for the community.

Lori Lerner Gray is a born-again environmentalist. She recycles cans, plastic and paper. She composts. Her garden is organic. She monitors the house to make sure the lights are turned off and has given son Scott, 13, a three-minute egg timer so he won’t waste water while taking showers.

In short, the Gray household in west Malibu is almost a model of the new environmental ethic for the ‘90s--”Reduce, Reuse and Recycle”--except for baby Rachel, 6 months old, whose 90 disposable diapers a week are adding steadily to the Southern California landfill problem.

“Here’s Earth Day coming up and I am lugging out these huge bags of diapers to the trash,” her mother frets. “It is more convenient, but the guilt is never-ending.”

That had not been the plan. When Rachel was born last October, Gray called Dy-Dee Diaper Service in Pasadena, whose newsletter she had picked up at her obstetrician’s office in Santa Monica. “It’s a great service--they have cloth diapers and they deliver something like 90 clean diapers every week and pick up the dirty ones,” she said. “Also they’re very environmentally oriented. Their newsletter has all sorts of reasons why disposable diapers are a threat to the environment.”

In fact, it was a statistic in the newsletter that had sparked her resolve.

“They said that 18 billion disposable diapers are buried in U.S. landfills every year. That’s the figure that got to me. And they don’t degrade. And by the way, it turns out that even the biodegradable diapers don’t degrade either.”

Dy-Dee had a convert. But when Gray called, she learned that Dy-Dee Diaper Service didn’t do Malibu.

“They said it was too far away, and they didn’t have the demand here. And when I checked around, I discovered they are the only diaper service available.”

The campaign was on. After a couple of conversations with the service representatives, she called the company president, Brian O’Neal, who proved to be “an OK guy,” she said, and willing to negotiate.

First they decided that Rachel’s diapers would be picked up in Santa Monica where Lori’s husband, Larry Gray, is supervising a construction project (“He was willing to schlep a bag of dirty diapers to work once a week”). But then she had second thoughts.

“I’ve been hearing a lot lately that we can all make a difference, and I decided it was time to take a stand. I thought, let’s get the diaper service out here.”

So she renegotiated and O’Neal agreed to send his diaper trucks to Malibu if she could enlist 30 customer families.

Gray knew she was not alone; she thinks of herself as typical of her baby boom generation. After a 15-year career as a radio news director, she carved out a niche that allows her to work from home by starting Radio Links, a company that produces entertainment features for radio stations.

“I’m 38, and a lot of women my age are having babies,” she said. “And we are all getting very conscious of the environment. People are changing right before your very eyes.”

So she posted little signs all over Malibu--in nursery schools, the Point Dume Pharmacy, the Baby Gym, in pediatrician’s offices--with the Dy-Dee Diaper Service telephone number.

“I stopped women in the supermarket who were buying diapers. Basically I relied on word of mouth. There are a lot of babies out here.”

Gray picked up support as she made her rounds. Anne Coffey of west Malibu was No. 11 to sign up.

“I think it’s great that somebody is doing this,” Coffey said. She had tried to get diaper service 15 months earlier when her son, Harry, was born. “It was a dead-end street--they had no interest at all in coming out here.

“I used disposable diapers and felt guilty. We are finally becoming aware that if we leave all our garbage around, our kids are going to be in trouble.”

By last week Gray had 29 names, and was still in hot pursuit of No. 30.

“We do give her credit,” said Dy-Dee president O’Neal. “It’s really amazing when someone calls and wants your service when you are spending hundreds of thousands of promotional dollars to get others to see your point of view.”

The business, something of a diaper empire, was started in 1938 by O’Neal’s father, he said, and “the environmental issues have always been a part of our advertising, but that hasn’t been a factor until lately. Our business has grown substantially in the last year and a half.”

His brother, Tim, runs the service in Orange County, which goes as far east as Riverside and as far north as Downey. Brian O’Neal’s office in Pasadena services “everything else including Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, the Antelope Valley and Victorville.”

Combined, said O’Neal, “we send out 32 delivery trucks every day that run on clean-burning fuels. We print 52,000 copies of our 20-page newspaper (the Wet Set Gazette) for expectant mothers and we have about 19,000 customers and 18 customer service representatives. A 90-diaper service costs $11.60 per week. We wash about 1.3 million cotton diapers a week.”

And beginning Tuesday, some of those diapers will come from Malibu, he said.

“I hadn’t thought there were enough customers out there to make it worthwhile. But if word of mouth only can produce 25 to 30 customers, we know we’ll get more when we put our trucks and advertising out there.