Unocal Car-Junking Bid Gets $700 Gift : Environment: Cypress Semiconductor’s president chips in to the oil firm’s effort to fight pollution. Unocal says it will match similar gifts.

Silicon Valley executive T. J. Rodgers read about Unocal Corp.’s offer to buy and scrap 7,000 heavily polluting cars last month, and was so impressed that he had his company dispatch a $700 check to Unocal Chairman Richard J. Stegemeier to “buy and bury one for us, too.”

“It was . . . such a creative, positive step in starting to work on pollution that I said, ‘This is a good idea,’ ” the president and chief executive of Cypress Semiconductor Corp. said Tuesday. Cypress is a San Jose integrated circuit maker.

Even though the giant oil company is hardly a charity case, Unocal knew a public relations bonus when it saw one. On Tuesday, it ran a full-page advertisement in The Times touting Rodgers’ magnanimity.

Unocal added that it would match up to 100 additional donations of $700 each from anyone else who donated to its program, which is intended to get the most heavily polluting cars--pre-1971 models--off the road.

So far, no other donors have come forward, though Unocal remains hopeful.

It won’t divulge how much it spent on the ad, but The Times charges between $30,200 and $44,118 for a full-page black-and-white ad, depending on the type of advertiser.

Cost is not the point, a Unocal spokesman said. “Mr. Stegemeier hoped to enliven the public debate over dealing with pollution,” said spokesman Michael Thacher. “We’re hoping that other companies will . . . see their own way toward doing something.”

Meanwhile, Rodgers hopes to persuade Unocal’s Northern California counterpart, Chevron Corp., to start a similar campaign. “If I can, then I know for a fact every company in Silicon Valley would give money,” he said.

Chevron spokesman Michael W. Libbey said the company had no plans to undertake such a program.

Why was Rodgers moved to such charity? “What impresses me about it is that in any other human endeavor, when you try to get something done, you try to motivate people,” he said. But too often, he added, “I think we only have the whip, and never the carrot, with regard to pollution.”

Unocal said response to its $700-per-car offer has been “overwhelming”--about 200 calls per day.

Already, 3,247 drivers have made appointments to sell their cars to the company starting June 1.