You’re in between classes on a Tuesday afternoon and you need a caffeine fix. You grab a can of Pepsi from a vending machine and head to your next class.

With only a minute to spare before you head into a smart classroom. You need to finish it because pop isn’t allowed in said classroom.

You chug the caffeine and look around for the nearest set of multi-colored waste/recycle bins. There’s one 20 feet away.

You take a good couple of seconds and finally find out it’s the red tower that caters to aluminum cans. You deposit it and walk into class thinking you’ve done your part to save the Earth.

Think again.

Until recently, the red, blue and black waste/recycling bins found all over campus were often just four separate trash cans.

Before, if something ended up in the wrong bin, the bin was treated as trash and thrown away, according to Building Services.

That’s right. Thrown away.

You were duped. We all were. NIU “Punk’d” us.

The extra second you took to figure out if your aluminum pop can should go in the red, blue or black container before was worthless.

But a recent change implemented by Waste Management will sort all recyclables and remove any unwanted trash.

The Northern Star begs the question — what took so long?

If we’ve had the bins for years, why are we just now starting to use them to their fullest potential?

Telling students their efforts to recycle were a waste of time is not only insulting to them, but they lose a bit of respect for NIU at the same time.

Here’s an institution based on knowledge and learning and the higher ups straight-out lie to 25,000 students on a daily basis. With every deposit of something recyclable, it’s one more little white lie to add to the pile.

With the amount of paper on the campus, including the 16,000 issues of the Star every day and NIU’s contract with Pepsi, one would think all those bottles, cans and pieces of paper would end up in a recycling plant, not a landfill.

So the next time you slow down to drop that empty pop can in the multicolored receptacles, know your choice will actually mean something — not only to NIU, but to the Earth as well.