Green purchasing behavior in the scope of sustainable consumption and the role of consumer-based factors

Today, environmental and sustainability problems and immediate prevention to be taken regarding these problems are among the important agenda and discussion topics of countries and states. Global warming, water, air and soil pollution, destroyed forests and climate change, depletion of water resources and epidemic disease threats are, that the whole world is witnessing today. The pressure of humans on nature and its impact on ecosystems are shown as one of the biggest causes of these threats. In the consumption society that human beings started with the industrialization process; it has been necessitated more research and implementation of green consumption and green purchasing behavior approaches because of many factors such as the unconscious use of natural resources, the consumption need of the increasing population, changing consumption habits in the process. In this direction, the main purpose of the study is to offer an alternative model proposal for determining the factors affecting the green product purchasing behavior of Turkish consumers. In the developed model of the study; the role of perceived consumer effectiveness, environmental concern and perceived consumer knowledge on green purchasing behavior through the green product purchasing intention has examined. In addition, these factors' correlates with the demographic characteristics of the consumers have also investigated. The questionnaire prepared online in the research was delivered to the participants via social media platforms. In this way 342 questionnaires were filled out by the participants. Analysis of obtained data from the questionnaires were performed with SPSS 24 and AMOS 24 package programs. According to the results of the analysis, it is seen that environmental concern has a significant effect on green purchasing intention but does not have any effect on green purchasing behavior. Similar to environmental concern, perceived consumer effectiveness has an effect on green purchasing intention, but has no effect on green purchasing behavior. It is seen that environmental knowledge has a significant effect on both green product purchase intention and green purchasing behavior. The results indicated that there is a statistically significant difference between the gender and age demographic characteristics of consumers in terms of green purchasing behavior.