Off Beat: The unintentionally racy side of recycling

A recent TV commercial drew chuckles with a variation on a recycling setup that raised some eyebrows locally a few years ago.

In the FedEx commercial, an environmentally conscious company is distributing recycled paper at a staff meeting.

Since the paper had printing on only one side, the employees were told to take notes on the blank side.

The meeting goes awry when people realize the material on the printed side is the company’s executive payroll list.

What happened at a local school district a few years ago was even weirder.

When a 10-year-old girl flipped over her math worksheet, what she found on the other side was a list of five possible attitudes toward sex.

That interesting discovery was an unintended consequence of a recycling program in the Woodland School District.

As an administrator explained to a Columbian reporter, that sheet of paper was a sample from a sex-ed curriculum the district had looked at a couple of years earlier but never implemented.

Do (only) the math

That unused worksheet was tossed into a file drawer and eventually was dumped into a paper recycling bin.

And then the piece of paper was retrieved so the blank side could become a fifth-grade math worksheet.

“We recycle,” the district official explained. “Unfortunately, this was an inappropriate piece of paper. Something slipped through.”

It was the first complaint in two years of that reuse program, the administrator said.

And some students actually enjoyed the two-sided worksheets, he continued. When they finished their assignment, they’d flip the paper over and work on whatever was on the other side.

— Tom Vogt

Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.