Exploring Sustainable Clothing Consumption in Middle-Income Countries: A case study of Romanian consumers

The overconsumption of consumers under today’s increasingly scarce natural resources has overwhelmed the textile industry in middle-income countries, such as Romania. It is becoming more and more essential to encourage sustainable clothing consumption behaviors, such as purchasing recyclable clothes. Notwithstanding, there is a limited number of studies trying to understand the intrinsic factors that motivate consumers’ purchase intention toward sustainable clothes in middle-income countries. Moreover, the effect of consumers’ environmental knowledge on determining their purchase intention of sustainable clothes remains understudied. Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to make a significant contribution to the sustainable consumption literature by providing a consolidated framework that explores the behavioral factors inclining Romanian consumers’ purchase intention towards sustainable clothes. The foundation of this study combines consumers’ altruistic value orientations and the theory of planned behavior. The partial least squares path modeling procedure was used to analyze the data of 1,018 Romanian respondents. The findings of this study show that altruistic value orientation, subjective norms, and sustainable attitudes have a positive effect on Romanian consumers’ purchase intention of sustainable clothing. Thus, these insights provide essential practical implications of advocating for the consumption of sustainable clothes along with useful guidelines for practitioners in the textile industry among middle-income countries, especially in Romania, to reduce overconsumption.