Look for the Recycling Label at Your Favorite Store : From reprocessed oil to plastic and paper products, one need not look far to find more environmentally friendly offerings.

For the past month I’ve been looking around stores in Ventura County to see if the wares I saw at a national convention on recycling are available hereabouts.

The newest trend in recycling, according to experts at the National Recycling Coalition convention, isn’t to find innovative techniques for separating garbage. Rather, it is to buy products with recycled content.

The exhibits looked more like the booths at a housewares convention--products for every room in the house. The place could have been a Wal-Mart: Brand names like Rubbermaid, Dan River Mills, Avery, Brawny, etc., were prominent. And, indeed, when I checked out our local branch of that mega-merchandiser--which opened for business this Halloween--I saw a lot of the same items. Evidently, recycled products have become mainstream products.

Consumers who feel that purchasing recycled products seems to be, well, unconventional--perhaps more appropriate for the hippies-in-Birkenstocks crowd--can be relieved. It is hard to cling to such notions when confronted by rows and rows of American flag-bedecked containers of re-refined oil and 10-foot displays of drain pans for keeping the substance from polluting the environment.

Kragen and Pep Boys have been selling recycled oil, but they don’t hit you over the head with the idea of recycling the stuff like Wal-Mart seems to be doing. Each of these stores, by the way, will take back your used crankcase oil for free and have it picked up by a company that reuses it in some non-polluting way. Some, but not all, is re-refined and repackaged for resale. The technical standards involved are the same as for virgin oil, so it’s perfectly OK to use.

And then there’s the matter of paper towels and other tissue products. Since Brawny--the popular and manly brand--has gone completely recycled, according to spokespersons at the convention, the rest of the industry is following suit. It’s not wimpy anymore.

Wal-Mart was filled with paper products proclaiming their recycled content. You can’t buy your holiday napkins there without trafficking in recycled goods. Rush Limbaugh, who thinks the whole environmental thing is bogus, would have a fit seeing this marriage of commerce and environmentalism.

Don’t get the idea that Wal-Mart is perfect. I couldn’t find a single rechargeable battery in the place. Just about everybody else with a retail license sells them. Why not Wal-Mart? I called corporate headquarters and learned it’s their policy not to carry such items.

There was plenty of stuff by Rubbermaid, the plastics company, which has been increasing the amount of recycled plastic it uses and widening the range of goods involved. Generally, the rigid containers and those not used for food have the highest recycled content.

And Dan River, the bedding goods company, was well represented. That company now produces comforters and pillows with fiber stuffing made from recycled pop bottles. Nowadays all the big retailers carry these goods. The supplier of this fiber material, Wellman Inc., also provides Coleman, the camping goods company, with the stuffing for its sleeping bags. And a refined version of the recycled fiber is being used at Patagonia for sportswear. We’re talking high-end and even high-fashion retailing here.

I was surprised to see the big school- and office-supply manufacturers at the convention and all over the county. Avery’s notebook subsidiary, K & M, evidently has 4,000 people in Torrance making school binders that are 59% recycled content, including 45% post-consumer waste.

Another widely selling manufacturer, Acco USA Inc., has gone so far as to emboss the recycling logo into the binders it makes from recycled milk and juice jugs.

So it looks like a lot of the stuff we thought we had seen the last of when we put it out on the curb is re-entering the county’s retailing mainstream.

Richard Kahlenberg, who writes the weekly Earthwatch column, has been reporting on the environment since Earth Day I. Nowadays he recycles everything. You can write to him at 5200 Valentine Road, Suite 140, Ventura 93003, or fax 658-5576.