Explaining Purchase Intention Towards Eco-Friendly Apparel: An Application of Theory of Planned Behavior

Introduction

Textile manufacturing is one of the polluting industry contributing approximately 1.2 billion tonnes of toxic greenhouse gases. According to Mckinsey (2016), due to increasing consumer purchase index companies are adopting unsustainable means like synthetic fiber and polyester leaving tons of waste water and other pollutants in order to fulfills customers demand. As polyester and other synthetic materials are produced from crude oil, the emission for production is reported much higher causing threats to the environment. The customer’s search for the latest design clothing had induced the cloths of shorter timeframe leading the excessive manufacturing and wastage both. According to an estimate due to improper recycling of polyester and other synthetic clothes approximately 60% of such items gets disposed off into the open environment in the form of landfill (Rogelj et al., 2018). The recent environment disasters like hazardous air quality, global warming, irregular pattern of heavy rainfall in one part of the world and historic high temperature in the other part of the world has grabbed the attention of world at the front of climate change issues and now consumers are getting more conscious about the products they are using and its impact on the environment. In the fashion industry it pioneered the termed like sustainable fashion/ecological fashion/green fashion/ethical fashion or organic fashion concepts. One of the recent incident of Indian national capital Delhi, where whole city becomes hostile due to extremely poor air quality and there was an emergence like situation. Similarly, one of the oldest city of India, Chennai is witnessing the worst ever situation of water crisis just like it was faced by the South African City Cape town in 2018.Due to these environmental disaster, the companies and consumer both are exhibiting the serious concerned about the wellbeing of the environments. The companies like No Nasties, Doodlage is utilizing recyclable material to produce clothing. The Raymond group, India’s leading textiles manufacturer has introduced ‘Ecovera’ range of garments made up from the specific R|Elan™ Green Gold fibers. These fibers are the product of recycling process of consumer’s waste PET bottles. In conjunction with the company’s effort of sustainable manufacturing it is also equally important to understand the customer’s behavior towards the purchase intention of ecofriendly apparels. As far as developing the understanding about consumers behavior towards eco-friendly products is concern the matured literature is available in American and European countries (Kumar & Ghodeswar, 2015) but as far as Asian countries are concern it is very less (Chen & Chai, 2010).The absence of consumer’s behaviors insight about eco-friendly consumption, will make it more difficult for the firm’s to device the appropriate strategies (Kim & Chung, 2011).

The gist of the preceding discussion demands the study to assess the consumer’s behaviors against the eco-friendly products and identify the factors leading or inhibiting them to behave as an environment friendly consumers. The study is situated in world’s fastest growing economy, India which also represents a great deal of Asian countries also. In the study the most prominently used Theory of Planned behavior was used assess the consumer’s intention and hence behavior towards eco-friendly apparels.