Cycling The Recycling Signs

I was at a food court in a mall, sitting fairly close to the trash cans. Next to the trash cans, there were a couple of recycling bins, one for bottles and one for cans. As I was watching, a woman walked up and dropped her bottle into the bin marked for cans. There was a clinking as the bottle hit metal, and I could see her realize that she’d just dropped the bottle into the wrong bin.

After pausing for a moment, she then reached down and pulled the lids off both bins. I thought maybe she was planning to pull out her bottle and put it in the right container, but instead, she swapped the two lids, placing the lid marked for bottles on the container for cans, and vice versa. She then turned around and spotted me watching. She quickly looked away and hurried off.

I ended up walking over and switching the lids back, but I really have to wonder how you can get so stubborn that you feel the need to swap the lids on recycling bins to pretend that you are “retroactively right” in which bin you dropped your trash into.

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