Barbecue Curbs: No Need to Fume Yet : Consumers: A ban on charcoal lighter fluid or pre-soaked briquettes won’t take effect until 1992. In the meantime, many alternatives are available when firing up the grill.

Take heart, beach and back-yard barbecuers. There’s hope for starting the barby, even without charcoal lighter fluid or pre-soaked briquettes, both of which will be banned in the Los Angeles Basin beginning in 1992.

And you may find you like the taste of the food better, too.

Alternative products--wax-treated chips and cubes of wood or sawdust, wood with natural resins, chimney or electric starters, nontoxic starting gel--are available on the market now. So are different kinds of wood--mesquite, hickory, alder, maple, orange, pear, cherry and apple--to add different flavors.

The latest flap for the $500-million-a-year charcoal briquette industry came last week when the South Coast Air Quality Management District voted to prohibit the sale of charcoal lighter and fluid-saturated briquettes in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, on Jan. 1, 1992, in an effort to reduce smog levels.

Although AQMD officials admitted that the elimination of lighter fluid to start fires will cut less than two-tenths of 1% of the pollution in the basin, this is the first time they have taken on consumer products in the war on air pollution.

AQMD officials say that residents of the four-county area use about 2,700 gallons of lighter fluid a day to ignite barbecue fires, emitting an average of two tons of pollutants into the air (lighter fluid is made from 100% petroleum compounds, the main smog component).

For their part, the industry-estimated 2 million barbecuers affected by the impending ban seemed to take the news in stride, probably because it doesn’t begin for 1 1/2 years. In a spot check of groceries, barbecue shops and home center stores, none reported a rush on charcoal lighter fluid. A few did receive inquiries about alternative starting methods for barbecue cooking.

Barbecue industry representatives, though, were not so complacent.

“If I were an inventor, I’d be looking at Los Angeles,” said Sandra Burton, executive director of the Barbecue Industry Assn. in Naperville, Ill., which represents manufacturers and suppliers of barbecue products. “We never knew (lighter fluid emission) was a problem. We know that pollution is bad (in Southern California)--we’re not arguing that point. We just would have liked to have had a little more time to reformulate the products so they will meet the standards.”

Industry representatives are gearing up to find new formulas for non-polluting liquid starters. “There’s already a prototype product, a reformulation, that reduced emissions by 50%,” Burton said. “If there’s a way to make them useable, then we’re going to do it.”

Burton said two-thirds of Americans who barbecue prefer to use charcoal lighter fluid.

Oakland-based Kingsford Products Co., which sells the majority of charcoal used in the U.S., found through sales data studies that 65% of Los Angeles barbecuers use lighter fluid to start their fires.

Kingsford, a division of Clorox Co., manufactures regular charcoal, pre-soaked briquettes, pre-treated individual bags and charcoal lighter fluid starter.

“We’re hopeful we’ll be able to come up with something that meets the (AQMD) standards,” said Kingsford spokeswoman Sandy Sullivan. “We’re primarily looking at liquids. The paraffin and wax products have been around a long time . . . . We’re working with the AQMD technical team on developing a methodology for testing (liquid starter), so it can become environmentally acceptable.”

However, Burton and Sullivan warn consumers not to use gasoline to ignite fires because it is dangerously flammable.

An independent market research study, commissioned by Kingsford in May, showed that 4 1/2% of those surveyed would opt for gasoline if charcoal starter were banned. “We didn’t expect it to be that high,” Sullivan said.

Under the new AQMD regulations, consumers will not be fined for using charcoal lighter fluid or pre-treated briquettes in 1992, but stores will be prohibited from selling it--if the liquid emits more than 0.02 pounds of pollutants each time it is used. Retailers who do sell the prohibited barbecue products can be assessed fines of up to $25,000 per day.

Propane and natural gas-fueled grills already comply with the new AQMD standards, as do electric starters and metal chimneys that use paper for starting charcoal fires. So do many wax-coated fire chips and nontoxic starter gels.

Consumers seem to be favoring the more natural products, wood and paraffin-coated charcoal, rather than chemicals, according to Mike Varley, vice-president of the Australian-headquartered Galore Group, which operates 13 Barbeques Galore stores in California.

“There’s been a very big swing in the last few years toward alternative products and gas barbecues,” Varley said. “The propane gas or the natural gas (grills) cost more money to begin with, but far less in the long run.” Gas grills, he explained, can run from about $79 to $1,200.

Among the alternative products are Happy Jack, a single-use bag of mesquite and oak wood charcoal coated with wax; Fire Flakes, wax-coated wood chips; Fat Wood and Fire Light Sticks with natural resins; Seymour Fire Blox, nontoxic fiberboard impregnated with wax.

Gelron Corp. (formerly Jiffy Products) in Lisle, Ill., manufactures Enviro-Fuel Gel Fuel and Hawaiian Fire Ring, an odorless, alcohol-based gel that is put in a metal ring and placed under the bottom grate of a barbecue.

In addition to limiting pollutants from back-yard barbecuing, the AQMD also is looking into ways to measure--and restrict--restaurant emissions.

The AQMD would like to reduce restaurant emissions by 90%, but it does not have a protocol for measuring pollutants emitted by restaurants, whether restaurants emit one or 50 pounds of pollutants a day, according to Robert W. Small Ph.D., director of the Center for Hospitality Management at Cal Poly Pomona.

BACKGROUND

The South Coast Air Quality Management District’s charcoal lighter sales ban is the first district effort to target a consumer product to try to clean up the Los Angeles Basin’s air. The AQMD board, formed in February, 1977, traditionally has regulated such operations as factories and oil refineries to reduce air pollution. But as part of a sweeping plan approved March 17, 1989, it now is aiming at industrial, commercial, agriculture, government and consumer products.