TRAVEL INSIDER : Tomorrow’s Market for Tourism’s Dirty Secrets : Pollution: A German auto club has shown that travelers want environmental reports on destinations.

Jerry Mallett had it made, or so he thought. There he was, the president of the Adventure Travel Society of Englewood, Colo., at ease in Belize during an eco-tourism conference last July. He headed for the shore at Ambergris Caye.

And found trash.

“It looked like they’d had a war,” Mallett said. “If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have gone.”

Mallett blames the refuse on the cruise ships that pass that Central American country, which lies below Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Belize tourism officials acknowledge such detritus as an occasional minor problem and say they’re working to correct it. But the point of Mallett’s story reaches beyond Belize’s shores.

While travel professionals, government officials, scientists and authors worldwide are clamoring to tell travelers how they can be kind to the environment, far fewer public and private officials are telling travelers how kind the environment will be to them at their next destination.

The leader in this field could be Allgemaener Deutsche Automobil Club, Germany’s version of AAA. Since 1989, when algae infestations ruined many European beaches for tourists, ADAC has acted as a source on beach quality.

At first, “we didn’t have information you can trust,” said Andreas Kippe, press officer for the organization. “If you ask the manager of some touristic region, he’ll tell you everything is OK.”

This year, working in cooperation with biologists from the German Institute for Hydrobiology in Constance, ADAC is expanding its program to include a 24-hour telephone message that evaluates beaches in Italy, France, Spain and Germany. The message, which is to be updated weekly or more often, will be based on water samples scrutinized by biologists under contract to ADAC, working alongside government officials.

The reports will address health risks for bathers, not overall environmental risks. “It’s not our job to be Greenpeace,” said ADAC information services director Peter Mikolaschek, adding that while the Adriatic is “nearly a dead sea” in terms of its native marine life, its waters pose no threat to short-term vacationers.

From June 1 to the end of August, the ADAC findings will be available on a series of Munich phone numbers. (The numbers, from U.S. phones, are 011-49-89-7676-2561 for most Italian beaches; 2562 for most Riviera beaches; 2563 for the south of France; 2564 for Spain’s Catalonia region; 2565 for Spain’s Andalusia region, and 2566 for Germany and the Baltic.) The service isn’t particularly convenient for Americans--since callers from the United States would have to first pay for an international call and then understand German--but authorities say there is no comparable service in this country.

Even eco-travel specialists can name few environmental information sources beyond skiers’ snow reports and Automobile Club road condition updates. The U.S. State Department offers travelers’ advisories to those who call (202) 647-5225, but concentrates on political instability and crime, seldom including environmental information.

“I wish we had a place to call, but we don’t,” said Virginia Hadsell, director of the 7-year-old Center for Responsible Tourism in San Anselmo, Calif.

“It seems like a natural idea, but I’m not aware of anyone in the U.S. doing anything like that,” said Allen Hammond, editor in chief of the annual Information Please Environmental Almanac, which published its first yearbook last November.

Many U.S. estuaries, Hammond noted, are afflicted with the same fertilizer-prompted algae problems that led to the ADAC service. And at any given time, there are probably other tourist destinations with environmental conditions that, in Hammond’s words, “the chambers of commerce aren’t necessarily going to tell you about.”

At the Grand Canyon, veteran visitors say, smog sometimes impedes the view.

Along the coastal Carolinas, unusually warm currents in recent years have brought “red tides” of toxic organisms, forcing closure of several beaches for days on end.

In San Diego, sewage spills have occasionally forced beach closures at Coronado and Imperial Beach. This year’s Feb. 2 pipeline rupture sent more than 4 billion gallons of partially treated sewage into coastal waters, closing many beaches for weeks. (San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau officials, to their credit, referred calls to local environmental officials.)

Other environmental concerns can be more subtle. In Colorado and other Western states, thousands of rafters and canoers yearly splash down rivers and streams that carry potentially hazardous heavy metals from old mining operations.

Federal Environmental Protection Agency officials, who have targeted several such sites for Superfund cleanup efforts, say the known metals and concentration levels in vacation areas threaten fish, but not short-term visitors. Still, officials acknowledge, many canoers would probably rather know more about the water than paddle in ignorance.

“We have a lot of information that should be generally available to the public. It is not,” said Suzanne Bolton, chief of ocean and coastal services for the federal National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s constituent affairs division.

Bolton suggests that “all kinds of spinoff businesses should be able to develop” among tourism-wise entrepreneurs repackaging environmental data already gathered by government agencies.

Until those entrepreneurs step forward, however, Bolton and other environmental officials offer several possible sources for the curious U.S. traveler:

--County and state health departments. Travelers in the United States can call those governmental sources at their destinations to ask if their plans are likely to pose unusual health threats.

--Federal Environmental Protection Agency officials. If travelers are wary of a specific air- or water-quality trouble spot, they may be able to learn more by calling the EPA office in their destination’s region. Region 9 (415-744-1500) includes California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii and other Pacific islands. Region 10 (206-442-4973) includes Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska. Region 8 (303-293-1692) includes Colorado, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota.

--National park and forest service offices. If a journey runs through federally controlled land, travelers can often get environmental updates from officials on the scene.

For more general information, there is the “1992 Information Please Environmental Almanac,” a 606-page volume compiled by Allen Hammond and a corps of contributors and published by Houghton Mifflin. There, travelers considering France can read that water pollution is a substantial problem in the Loire and Seine rivers, that the French lag behind much of Europe in waste-water treatment, and that acid rain and other pollutants have at least moderately damaged 6% of forest trees there.

Belize’s beaches, by the way, aren’t in the “Environmental Almanac” index. And Jerry Mallett, whose next adventure is a kayaking expedition in the waters off San Francisco, is among those eager to see an American tourists’ environmental hot line.

“I think it’s a great idea. I think it’s going to be an issue that people are going to want to look at,” Mallett said. “And if somebody offers a service, everybody’s going to move to clean up, because the dollars involved in this kind of tourism are enormous.”