A Close- Up Look At People Who Matter : Comfort Goes Far, Wide for Environment

Four years ago, recycling cans was about as far as Maria Comfort went to advance the cause of the environment.

“I didn’t start out as an environmentalist, but I became one,” said Comfort, an Encino resident and businesswoman who three months ago went as far as Kobe, Japan, for the cause.

“It looked more like pictures I saw of Nagasaki,” said Comfort, president of OSA Inc. Absorbents and Environmental Services of Inglewood.

In February, Comfort was invited to Kobe to help minimize the environmental damage caused by that city’s 7.2 earthquake.

The Kobe quake, which hit on the one-year anniversary of the Northridge earthquake, killed more than 5,200 people. The city’s water treatment facility was wrecked. Oil, gas and other dangerous hydrocarbons--usually filtered and safely contained--were flowing freely into the sea.

“They had absolutely nothing, no alternate methods,” said Comfort, who had at first been told that Japanese officials were not accepting donations from U. S. companies.

But through a business contact--who had planned to fly from Kobe to Los Angeles the day of the quake--she was able to donate 450 oil-absorbent pillows, booms and socks to skim the oil slick off the water.

The booms are each filled with a thousand pounds of recycled paper, which has been treated with a secret recipe that Comfort and her partner, Ed Lunenschloss, cooked up in the kitchen three years ago by boiling newspapers.

Four years ago, Comfort met Lunenschloss, an inventor who had discovered a way of using paper to clean up oil spills. A year later, they had perfected and patented their own formula.

Working out of a red-brick building in Inglewood, Comfort and a staff of eight employees--plus two cats and an 18-year-old dog--manufactured environmental products, from the oil-absorbing booms to small, donut-shaped filters to contain gasoline leaks from nozzles.

The company also makes materials to clean up hazardous wastes and even a kitty litter safe to flush down toilets.

The raw material they use is paper sludge from manufacturers, recycled newsprint and cardboard. During a week in Kobe, Comfort trained Japanese officials on how to use that material.

“I was very humbled by the sight,” said Comfort about Kobe. “I felt like I was such a small part of a large undertaking.”

Raised in a strict Italian family in San Francisco, Comfort started out as an airline stewardess, until a back injury landed her in a hospital bed. Sharing her room was an elderly woman who changed her conservative life.

“I have a past that most young women would like to have for a future,” said the woman, who regaled Comfort with stories about the old days of Hollywood, and drank Bloody Marys against doctors’ orders. Although she never got her name, Comfort said the woman taught her not to be afraid of new things.

“She was an angel who walked into my life and said, ‘It’s OK to walk through the door’ ” and not be afraid of taking chances, Comfort said. Her new life led her into a quick marriage to a U. S. Naval officer and a wide variety of experiences.

Widowed 23 years ago this week, Comfort and her two children moved to Santa Barbara and eventually to Hollywood when her son, David, insisted he could be a movie star.

Managing his career as a child actor--he landed parts on “General Hospital” and some movie roles--led her to become a professional manager for child actors for 10 years.

Then, she went into sales and eventually started OSA Inc., which is to her a way of preserving a future for children, who she said are growing up in a very different world than she.

“Everybody knew what they were going to be when they grew up,” Comfort said about her childhood. “Everybody knew they were going to grow up.”