Wanting to clean up his act after a career creating trash.

RICHARD Feldman hopes his new business, Clear Creek Compostables, can catch he rising demand for environmentally sound products--and put his other company out of business.

Feldman recently started Westwood-based Clear Creek in the same office as his 5-year-old Custom Food Packaging, a maker of plastic "clamshell" containers used for custom and gourmet confections sold in grocery stores.

The cheap, environmentally indestructible plastic Feldman and many other manufacturers sell to distributors is a mainstay of food packagers, but are taking up a growing share of the country's packed landfills.

Feldman, who has spent nearly his entire career in the food packaging business, is wing to change that by not only' going back to paper products. but taking it one step further: manufacturing paperware without toxic coatings, which means they can be thrown into compost facilities.

"I've been in the food packaging business for more than 30 years," he said. "I've filled up more than my fair share of landfills and something must be done to responsibly deal with the prolific waste produced in this industry."

Feldman, of course, is hardly the first person to tackle the issue of the rising use of plastic. An assortment of companies, including Fortune 500 businesses such as DuPont, makes biodegradable plastics and other similar products.

However, Feldman is going a step beyond biodegradable and joining an even newer move into compostables.

Biodegradable means that a plastic will eventually break down in a landfill but in the process could leave behind toxic chemicals. Compostable items, however, must meet a more stringent standard. They cannot leave any chemicals or toxins--and can be utilized to create a agricultural compost in conjunction with other decaying materials such as food scraps and green waste.

Though Clear Creek just launched late last year, its products are already being distributed by giant restaurant services company Sysco Corp. and is on the shelves of Whole Foods Market Inc. and Sam's Club. Feldman said he has billed $130,000 in March alone and is projecting $3 million in sales for the company's first year.

"The West Coast is definitely in the vanguard for developing the composting business," said Steve Mojo, a compost expert who runs the Biodegradable Products Institute, based in New York City.

Clear Creek's products are made in China from substances such as com starch and sugar cane pulp, and can fully degrade in a compost facility in 60 to 90 days.

Though Clear Creek only makes bowls, plates and utensils now, Feldman said he is in the final stages of development of a disposable coffee cup that he believes could far outsell his existing product line given rising retail sales of coffee products.

And while compostable paper products aren't being widely used yet, Feldman said demand is mounting as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and other cities establish programs in which restaurants, grocers and cafeterias are encouraged and sometimes rewarded to send their food scraps and food-soiled paper to compost facilities.

There are 125 restaurants participating in L.A.'s composting program, which started in April 2004 and is run by Norcal Waste Services, a private company that also runs San Francisco's program. The city provides a $600,000 annual subsidy to the program, which eliminates about 600 tons of food waste a month from landfills. The scraps are composted at a facility just outside Bakersfield where it is sold to local growers as a soil conditioner, said Zafar Karimi, who runs the program for L.A.'s Bureau of Sanitation.

Meanwhile, in Portland, Ore., the city provides no subsidy to a program that started last year but has already attracted 60 Portland-area businesses and sends the restaurant scraps to a compost facility where it is turned into fertilizer that is sold both in bulk and in retail outlets.

Program coordinator Babe O'Sullivan said the city is recruiting other businesses to take part.

"Our composting program takes about 700 tons of waste out of the system each month," O'Sullivan said. "In order for the program to facilitate itself we need to get up to about 40,000 tons a year."

The program in Portland and another in Seattle are run by Seattle-based Cedar Grove Composting, which certifies materials as compost-safe and provides the facilities where the waste can be taken to be degraded.