Business Magazine Spotlights Environment

MAGAZINES put out by environmental activists generally complain about the evil doings of big business. And traditional business magazines usually grouse about the narrow-minded views of environmentalists. But ECO is a new business magazine that aims to strike a reasonable balance.

``ECO is a business magazine first,'' says Carrie Hunter, ECO's associate publisher. ``Its underlying theme is the environment taken from a corporate perspective.''

The premier issue, printed earlier this summer, included interviews with the chairmen of numerous corporations, including H. Laurance Fuller of Amoco, Paul O'Neill of Alcoa, Samuel Johnson of S. C. Johnson & Son, and others. ECO let them describe their problems, priorities, and philosophies of environmental protection.

Ms. Hunter says that the magazine's editors see more companies starting to think about closed-loop processes, where manufacturing byproducts are recycled or reused instead of becoming industrial waste.

ECO's articles cover a range of topics at the intersection of business and the environment. The first issue moves from a nitty-gritty discussion of the regulatory atmosphere in Washington to a discussion of ``Today's Real Environmental Art'' with Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.