White House Blocks Pollution Plan : Environment: The EPA proposal may yet succeed, a spokesman says. It called for the government to promote pollution-free technology and recycling.

In another high-level skirmish over environmental policy, the White House rejected an Environmental Protection Agency proposal to launch a major federal pollution control effort on Earth Day last April 22, officials said Tuesday.

EPA officials prepared a nine-page executive order for President Bush that would have committed the federal government to use its massive buying power to promote recycled products and “clean technologies,” but the proposal was rejected, EPA and White House aides said.

The officials said the main reason the proposal was blocked was that it was made too hastily and was seen by some White House officials as an attempt to make an end run around normal policy deliberations--in which EPA and White House officials have clashed in the past.

“It was a last-minute thing that didn’t come together,” a White House official said. “It would have required short-circuiting the process, and we didn’t want to do that.”

A spokesman for EPA Administrator William K. Reilly said the agency’s proposal for broader legislation to promote pollution-free technology and recycling is still alive.

“It’s all still under negotiation,” spokesman David Cohen said. “This has been Bill Reilly’s No. 1 priority, and it’s just a matter of time before it gets done . . . . It hasn’t been blocked in any permanent sense.”

Nevertheless, environmentalist Barry Commoner charged that the White House staff, by turning down the EPA proposal, “deprived President Bush of an opportunity to lead on this issue.”

“It was an act of courage on Reilly’s part to prepare this, but it was blocked,” he complained.

The draft executive order, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, would have declared that traditional environmental protection approaches, which stress treatment and disposal of pollutants after they are produced, “will not be adequate to assure protection of human health and the environment.”

Instead, it said, the federal government should actively promote “innovative pollution prevention programs” and should “build markets for clean products” by buying more of them.

Commoner said that provision could help promote such products as electric cars. “The government would be using its purchasing power to make it worthwhile for General Motors to market them,” he said.

He said EPA officials had told him that some of the ideas for the draft executive order had come from his most recent book, “Making Peace With the Planet.”

“For years, I’ve been hammering away at the fact that dealing with pollution by cleaning up pollutants after the fact has failed and that the only success stories have come from changing our methods of production--taking the lead out of gas, banning DDT,” he said. “Here you have the EPA agreeing, but they can’t get the policy implemented.”

Commoner said he believes that the executive order was blocked by White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, who has been accused of seeking to weaken several environmental policy initiatives. But White House and EPA officials said the proposal never reached Sununu. Instead, they said, it stalled at a lower level, in the Office of Management and Budget.