Culture : Guzzling Beer With a Conscience in Munich : At this year’s Oktoberfest, plastic plates are out and sorting trash is in. It aims to be the world’s most Earth-friendly drinking party.

The gurneys were parked outside the Red Cross trailer, where the white-smocked medics braced themselves for another dash into the combat zone to pick up their next Bierleichen.

That means “beer corpses” for the unenlightened, and at Germany’s rollicking Oktoberfest, the comatose quaffers can pile up quickly.

“Most just sleep it off here for a few hours, but some we have to give glucose injections to bring around,” Red Cross nurse Volker Ruland said. “If their heart stops, we send them to the hospital.”

It’s been 181 years--and no one knows exactly how many bottles of beer on the wall--since Crown Prince Ludwig married Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen and inadvertently launched a Bavarian bacchanalia that now draws millions of thirsty visitors from all over the world.

Ludwig’s reception in the meadow outside the city gates on Oct. 12, 1810, originally focused on a horse race, which proved so popular that it became an annual event.

Small beer booths appeared on the grounds in 1818, and by the time the first beer tents went up in 1896, everyone had forgotten about the horses altogether.

Now Oktoberfest bills itself as the largest people’s fair in the world, with local breweries spending millions of dollars to erect colorful tents that seat up to 10,000 people at a time. Computers in the tents record reservations.

“We don’t even promote Oktoberfest anymore,” said Hedda Manhard of the Munich tourism bureau. “Wherever we Muenchers go in the world, people say, ‘Oh, Munich. Beer. Oktoberfest . ‘ Of course, Munich is the city of beer and Oktoberfest, but culturally, we’ve got lots more to offer.”

This year, Oktoberfest was also trying to forge a new image--as the most environmentally friendly beer bash in the world.

Strict new environmental laws in Munich outlawed the use of cans and paper or plastic plates, utensils and cups. Consumers who didn’t want beer had to buy soda in recyclable bottles, paying a 75-cent deposit on each one.

Concessionaires and the beer tents all had to sort their mountains of trash as well, picking out grilled chicken carcasses, half-eaten sausages and other leftovers for containers that collect compost, slop for animal feed and fat for commercial use. Paper and recyclable glass went into their own dumpsters, which were hauled away by a recycling firm.

“It’s been very successful so far, and it makes a lot of sense,” said Georg Welsch, a member of the Greens environmental party on the City Council.

Officials say Oktoberfest produced 30% less trash as a result of the new rules.

“It’s tough at first, but I think it’s working fine,” said Michael Schottenhamel, whose family has run an Oktoberfest beer tent since his great-grandfather opened a booth 125 years ago. “We had to hire four extra people just to sort trash,” Schottenhamel said.

Critics have questioned whether the soap, water and electricity needed to run all the dishwashers doesn’t cause more environmental stress in the long run than plastic plates and soda cans. This year, dishwashers were blamed for a 5.4% rise in the amount of electricity Oktoberfest used and a 4.6% jump in the amount of water.

“Environmental experts say there’s less damage than with disposable plastic plates,” tourism official Hans Spindler asserted. “This is the first year, so it’s a test run,” he added. “We’ll know afterward what we can do better next time.”

Small food and beverage stands were forced to make menu adjustments to cope with their new dish-washing duties, and some, like the Wai-Kiki fruit juice hut, reported business was down because people didn’t want to stand there to finish their refreshments and return the glasses. “A lot of the sausage stands aren’t serving sauerkraut this year,” Spindler said. “They’re sticking the sausage in a roll instead, so people can wander off with them.”

The innovation didn’t go over well with festival-goers, however, and sausage stands reported sluggish sales.

While beer is certainly Oktoberfest’s main attraction, it’s not the only one. A carnival midway and scores of souvenir stands offer something for tots and teetotalers, and the milk bar averages 1,500 quarts a day--meaning 125 cows were milked daily just for Oktoberfest .

The festival’s lost and found is also a popular stop. Hundreds of sets of lost keys hang on a pegboard, and file cabinets are stuffed with wallets and eyeglasses. “You can usually count on a pair of false teeth showing up,” festival director Helmut Deichstetter said.

“Someone turned in a bra this year,” he added, “but the owner hasn’t come in to claim it.”

Such absent-mindedness may be partly to blame on Oktoberfest beer, which is specially brewed stronger than usual. German beer normally has an alcohol volume of about 5%, but for the festival it’s 6%.

The Oktoberfest suds are sold in one size only--a liter, which, to the ire of consumers, cost about $5 this year, up nearly a dollar from last year’s price.

Theft of the thick glass kruege , or mug, is one of the Oktoberfest’s biggest banes, with an average of 200,000 or so usually missing by the end of the 16-day festival, which traditionally concludes on the first Sunday of October.

“We found 8,000 mugs outside the tents on the fairgrounds on one day alone,” Spindler said. “And that’s not counting all the people who got caught at the door and sent back inside with their mugs.”

Waiters and waitresses with aching backs and strained shoulders are another Oktoberfest casualty, showing up regularly at the Red Cross station where the Bierleichen snore in small dorms known as the dry-out rooms.

“We have one waitress who can carry 14 kruege at one time,” Schottenhamel said. “That’s probably around 55 pounds. It’s all in the technique. Work here for three days and we’d have you doing that too.”

Multilingual beer guards patrol the tents to apprehend kruege kleptomaniacs and to break up the inevitable brawls--not to mention the occasional striptease.

They also discourage people like the Englishman who jumped atop a table and mooned the crowd this year, or the chief surgical nurse at Munich’s most prestigious hospital who performed a go-go dance on a table last year with such abandon it took seven policemen to get her down.

The lack of inhibitions also leads to other brazen stunts, such as using the kruege as portable pissoirs.

“People will try to steal anything,” Schottenhamel added. “We have people stealing chairs.”

Different tables of drinkers try to out-bellow each other singing their national drinking ditties, tent officials say, and fights break out when people attempting to knock their mugs together in camaraderie miss and slosh beer on someone.

Australians seem to rate the most votes for obnoxious behavior, with New Zealanders and Americans close behind.

Although sales and attendance were both down slightly this year, police said, violence was on the rise. A 20-year-old Turkish man was stabbed to death and his 15-year-old companion seriously wounded in one of dozens of knife fights reported on the fairgrounds, which, despite the asphalt, locals still call “the meadow.”

“The brawls are getting more and more brutal,” police spokesman Hermann Wolf said. Officers intervened in more than 500 incidents this year and arrested more than 100 people. Some 50 revelers were injured severely enough to warrant assault charges against the assailants.

Although some visitors say breweries have been known in the past to encourage heavy drinking by awarding lapel pins to anyone still conscious after five mugs--more than a gallon of beer--tent operators deny this.

“There’s no prize, and there never has been,” insisted Gunter Steinberg, proprietor of the Hofbraeu tent, which police and tourism officials singled out as the rowdiest Oktoberfest tent.

“There have been fewer brawls than ever this year,” Steinberg said.

“The mood is totally gemutlich. “

252 Beer Corpses, and Other Trivia

Here is a look at Oktoberfest, 1991, by the numbers: * Visitors: 6.4 million, down slightly from 6.7 million last year

(Italians made up the biggest percentage of foreign visitors, followed by Austrians and Swiss. Organizers reported fewer Americans and Japanese this year.)

* One-liter mugs of beer consumed: 5.2 million, down from 5.4 million last year * Beer mugs estimated stolen: 200,000, about one-third fewer than last year * Stolen beer mugs recovered: 75,000 * Liters of milk served: 25,000 * Oxen eaten: 80 * Broiled chickens eaten: 750,000 (same as last year) * Favorite new dish offered this year: saumagen , or stuffed sow’s belly * Trash: About 6,925 cubic meters, down 30% from last year * Bierleichen, or beer corpses (passed-out drunks treated at the Red Cross tent): 252, up from 173 last year * Items turned into lost and found: About 5,000, including a brassiere, a pair of ski poles, season tickets for a Bavarian soccer team and two pairs of false teeth * Children lost: about 200 * Incidents requiring police intervention: 513, up from 414 last year * Arrests: 106, up from 77 last year * Serious injuries with beer mugs as the weapon: 15 * Other serious injuries: 23 * Deaths: 1, a Turkish man fatally knifed in a scuffle