Apartment life rant

We are currently renting an Apt in a planned community in MD. The area is beautiful, manicured lawns, duck pond, pools galore. Townhouses go for 350 thousand and single-family homes are half a million at best. On this 90-degree day I’m looking out my window and watching the sprinklers watering the lawn at 12noon. I called the rental office and asked if they knew that you should not water lawns in the middle of the day but at night, that the lawn is not benefiting from the sprinklers. The woman on the other end asked if the sprinklers were bothering me…well yes, they are. It’s bothering me that you are wasting water. That wasn’t good enough of an answer.
When we first moved here from Seattle, WA I was shocked to discover that they don’t recycle in this apt community. What?!?! No recycling?!?! Coming from the recycling center of Seattle I just couldn’t believe it. In Seattle they recycle everything, they even have days where you can get mulch for free made from trees that the power company had to trim back for the safety of power lines. I asked the rental office why they don’t recycle and the simple answer was “it’s too expensive”. It’s frustrating to live in this type of environment where I watch moms on the playground simply throw the yogurt container in the trash and I want to scream “carry it home and recycle that!” This mindset is, in my opinion, how our planet has gotten as bad as it is. It’s not convenient to recycle…god forbid you have to rinse out the container before putting it in the bin…or it’s too expensive for an apt community to get a recycling dumpster that I’m paying monthly more in rent than I will on a home mortgage. So every other week I drive myself to the recycling center, which just happens to be 5 miles from my house, and I dispose of our rather large load of recyclables. On my last visit I asked one of the workers if I could take things out of the large trash dumpster, they looked at me like I was insane. But sitting on top was a little girls bike and while talking to the worker he said he has a little girl that needs a bike I told him he should pull it out and take it home. After much convincing he did…hopefully I created a dumpster diver in him.