Determinants on Green Product Purchasing Intention: The Case of Recycled Plastic Products

Human kind has the majority share of creating waste and this waste endangers the life of many living now and should be considered as a great threat for next generation if not managed deliberately. Simultaneously ethical thinking and to a recent trend green consumerism had become an interesting topic for scholars to follow and is clearly requires a great understanding of purchasing intention for ultimate users of such products. Although it is important to note that the subject of green consumer is not a new topic. In this research a green consumer’s attitude and behavior towards green product purchase are examined. Katz (1960) proposed a behavioral theory known as the functional attitude theory. Functional attitude theory withholds that attitudes evolve in individuals as a mean to serve their goals, and all attitudes intentionally minister this basic function to a proportion. Aiding from this theory in this research it is aimed to demonstrate reasons behind attitude and purchase intentions made by consumers of environmental friendly matters such as recycled plastic substances. Otoo et al. (2018) stated that waste is rich in water, nutrients, energy and organic compounds, thus it is a suitable input alternative for (recycled) production, that’s the main reason why recycled plastic product is chosen as the main green product. The structure of this dissertation begins with a literature review and compiling solid information to form hypotheses. The main objective of this dissertation is purchase intentions of recycled plastic products. This behavior arouse from an affective attitude that is also measured. Merely this attitude comes from three main functions and these functions include utilitarian, social-adjustive and value-expressive. As a moderating factor the effect of emotional value is also examined. The data was collected from 550 respondents sampled from country of Iran. The content of findings were also included in this dissertation followed by discussion about the objectives of the research from the findings. In this research 3 sets of functional attitude that serve as a function are found to be having a positive effect on the affective attitude that leads to purchase intention with the exception of emotional value moderating the expressive functions. Nonetheless, similar to any social science research, limitations and future implementations of this research were also exhausted in the final chapter. Keywords: Attitude, Behavior, Emotional Value, Functional Attitude Theory, Green Consumer, Green Marketing, Green Purchase Intetion, Purchase Intention, Recycled Plastic Products, Social-Adjustive, Utilitarian, Value-Expressive.