My Berkeley cottage is one of five small homes on the property. We’re legally a condominium development but we’re so small we run it informally. No one pays dues. I guess I’m the “HOA,” because I handle the common bills and keep a spreadsheet and circulate it for reimbursement once a quarter.

You’d think with such a small group we’d have no hassles. I’d have to disabuse you. Some of us scuffle at times. But mostly we co-exist and get along.

Legally we’re entitled to five garbage cans and five recycling containers. But that would be crazy. There’s no place to store ten rolling bins. No one wants to pay fives times what one costs. So we share.

Which brings me to today’s subject. We have one of those split rolling recycling bins. The brown half of the top opens for paper and cardboard, and the blue half is for bottles and cans. The brown side is always overstuffed at the end of the week and the blue side never gets filled. But the can design is nice.

I do not understand why some people don’t flatten their boxes before putting them in the recycling container. My friends say it’s because they’re lazy, but I don’t think that’s it. The container is too narrow to take a unbent pizza box or wine carton. The resident who is hogging all the container room is NOT simply tossing the box; he or she attempts to strong-arm the cardboard structure into a shape that can be jammed in the bin. That attempt takes more energy and produces more frustration than deconstruction of the box.

Boxes are born flat. They readily return to their two-dimensional roots, even if their constructor has overapplied glue to their seams. It’s way easier to flatten a cardboard box and bend it than to try to jam it whole into a small aperture.

My recycling foes are not lazy. They’re somehow, in some way, angry … at the disposal process? Their stubborn shove is a form of tantrum about something. Passive aggressive. I think their time would be better spent collapsing the box and dealing with whatever the problem is.