Several of the methods in java.util.Collections, such as sort and shuffle, modify collections in place. If you call one of these methods on a newly-allocated collection and don't use it later, you are doing unnecessary work. You probably meant to keep a reference to the newly-allocated copy of your collection and use that in the rest of your code.

For example, this code sorts a new ArrayList and then throws away the result, returning the unsorted original collection:

public Collection<String> sort(Collection<String> foos) {
  Collections.sort(new ArrayList<>(foos));
  return foos;
}

The author probably meant:

public Collection<String> sort(Collection<String> foos) {
  List<String> sortedFoos = new ArrayList<>(foos);
  Collections.sort(sortedFoos);
  return sortedFoos;
}