A crafter's life...saving the world

I'm studying to reach the Energy Engineer degree, so i'm full of greenhouse gases, Kyoto protocol, renewable energies and so on. My thesis is about an absorption chiller/heater, and i've written an entire chapter about the possibility to use solar thermal panels with the chiller: in summer, when there will be more hot, the chiller will give more cold, with only a little electric absorption, instead of using electric-based chillers. I think that this will be a saving planet tecnology.

Meanwhile, crafters in their little, save the planet, reusing and recycling a lot of stuff. I was thinking that, with a little care, the recycling behaviour will allow us to save a lot of money (above the planet), and the money problem is a everyone problem with this financial crisis.

So, my question is: why the recycling habit is not an everyone habit?
The city life has driven us away from the nature, so we don't have under our eyes the direct impact of our behaviour. We tend to be frightened when we saw an huge plume of smoke that exit from an industry, but we don't mind of having little but lot of habits not so eco friendly. Me for first, i admit to have some wrong behaviours, but i decided to stop, i want to take the pledge to live eco friendly!