Green purchasing is an important part of environmental sustainability and responsible stewardship of resources. It involves the acquisition of goods and services that are environmentally friendly and reduces the negative impacts of production, use and disposal. Green purchasing can help reduce environmental pollution, conserve natural resources, reduce energy and water use, reduce waste and reduce the environmental costs of production, transportation, and disposal.

Factors affecting green consumption have been a long subject of research. The early literature on green consumption presented the term in the context of “societal marketing,” which addressed environmental questions (Fisk, 1974; Henion and Kinnear, 1976) and studied economic incentives and socio-demographic segmentation. Later on, individual values, emotions and attitudes proved to be more important. Environmental attitudes, knowledge and personal responsibilities showed to have positive effects on green consumption in some cases but not in others. Dominant social paradigms (e.g., consumerism), individual and collective norms, and habits, such as the perception that green products are luxuriously expensive and insufficient or incorrect information, may reduce green consumption.

All these factors are affected by the agenda presented in the mass media and discussion platforms, which may, if effective, create group norms and affect intentions and actual behavior (Moore and Moschis, 1983; Willnat and Weaver, 2018; Chen et al., 2019).

In Europe, green consumption is a subject of a number of political initiatives on the level of the EU and single countries. The EU is considered a global leader in environmental and climate change politics (Skovgaard, 2014; Fischer and Geden, 2015); green procurement is an essential part of public and private consumption policies (Calabro, 2007). These initiatives are not always accepted positively by the local population, which may affect the willingness to purchase green products. In the Czech Republic, environmentally charged EU policies traditionally evoke controversy, as they negatively affect coal-producing regions, limit the supply of cheap but environmentally damaging products, and incorporate environmental externalities into the product prices. The EU Environmental policies damaged the economies of the poor coal-producing regions and created an aversion in part of the population to EU integration (Cabelkova et al., 2020; 2022).

Environment protection requires relevant knowledge transferred to the general public through school education or various types of mass media (traditional, online, social). In this field, research on the media’s role in different sustainable actions is still largely missing (Chen et al., 2019).

This paper aims to study the role of environmental attitudes, perceptions on climate change, attitudes to the EU, and media exposure in predicting environmentally responsible consumption in the Czech Republic. We distinguish three types of “green” commodities: organic food, local food, and environmentally friendly products. Methodologically we rely on Principal Component Analysis (PCA), correlation, and ordinal regression analyses applied to a representative sample of 904 respondents (aged 15–95 years, M ± SD: 47.74 ± 17.66; 51.40% women, 19.40% with higher education) in the Czech Republic to reach the following research objectives:

1. The literature suggests that environmental concerns and attitudes may increase green purchases. However, the effect does not always manifest itself as economic and normative factors may play a bigger role. For example, green products may be considered luxuriously expensive, and the norm is not to buy them. The paper aims statistically examine the effect of environmental concerns and attitudes on green purchasing.

The paper is structured as follows. The first section briefly reviews the literature on green purchasing and provides the literature review on the factors affecting green consumption. The following sections discuss the role of preferences for environment protection, climate change, EU policies, and the mass media related to green purchasing and the relevant agendas in European contexts. Then, we describe the model, data, and methods. The results, discussion and conclusions close the paper.

Green purchasing (GP) refers to 1) purchasing environmentally friendly products, which are usually recycled and bring benefits to the environment, and 2) avoiding products that harm the environment (Chan, 2001; Mostafa, 2007; Steg and Vlek, 2009). In this regard, GP should be distinguished from sustainable purchasing, which, besides environmental sustainability, accounts for economic, social, health, and other sustainability aspects (Miemczyk et al., 2012).

While the definition of green products is relatively simple in practice, there is still a certain controversy about which products can be classified as green (Huijbregts et al., 2008; Hanafiah et al., 2012; Mancini et al., 2016) since many environmental externalities cannot be directly measured. Nevertheless, green marketing utilizes the green phenomenon to propagate some products as “green” via various “green” certificates and labels (Boström and Klintman, 2008; Schwartz et al., 2020). Besides the products themselves, a number of certificates and labels are employed to indicate the use of eco-friendly or recycled materials in production or packaging, sustainable agrarian practices, or responsible animal handling (eco-labeling, Dhir et al., 2021; Anuar et al., 2020).

Though green- and eco-labeling and environmental concerns are on the rise, the actual purchase of green products still falls behind (Rizqiyana and Wahyono, 2020; Wojnarowska et al., 2021). The intention to purchase green often is not followed by the action. Hughner et al. (2007) showed that though 67% of consumers reported a positive attitude to organic food products, only 4% purchased those products. The discrepancy between the positive attitude and actual green purchases is widely reported in the literature as [“green purchasing inconsistency” or “green attitude-behavior gap” (Joshi and Rahman, 2015; Wang et al., 2019a; Witek, 2019)]. The following section presents the factors affecting green consumption and green purchasing per se.

Green purchasing belongs to a more general category of green consumption. The concept of green consumption first emerged in the 1970s in the United States, alongside the development of “societal marketing,” which addressed environmental questions. Fisk’s Theory of Responsible Consumption (Fisk, 1974), Henion and Kinnear’s Ecological Marketing (Henion and Kinnear, 1976), and Kardash’s Ecologically Concerned Consumer (Kardash, 1974) all contributed to categorizing green consumption. Initially, research focused on energy use, pollution connected to the automobile, oil, and chemical industries, as well as consumer reactions to advertising and labeling (Henion and Kinnear, 1976; Kilbourne and Beckmann, 1998; Peattie, 2010). Later, the studies concentrated more on green purchases of food products and environmentally friendly products.

The literature on factors affecting green consumption aimed at defining factors that might help to increase green consumption. Obviously, the factors in question reflected the dominant social and economic paradigms of a particular period and social context. The early literature concentrated on economic incentives and financial possibilities of households, socio-demographic characteristics, and environmental knowledge (Peattie, 2010). The proponents of economic rationality viewed green consumption as primarily affected by economic factors and suggested that government policy must provide primarily economic incentives (Bartelings and Sterner, 1999; Eriksson, 2004; Jackson, 2005; Wang et al., 2021; Shen and Wang, 2022). This approach is still used, for example, in waste management, where the households are incentivized to sort communal waste by making the disposal of sorted waste free of change. The economic literature also suggests that more affluent households produce a larger environmental footprint but can afford to purchase “greener” goods (Cymru, 2002; Lenzen and Murray, 2003; Huang, et al., 2022). Thus, income rise may increase green consumption.

Socio-demographic aspects as predictors of green consumption were originally important primarily from the point of view of market segmentation according to sex, age, presence and number of children, educational level, and socioeconomic class (Laroche, et al. (2001); Robinson and Smith (2002); Jenkins, et al. (2003). Yet, they are still frequently included in empirical analyses, often as control variables (Walia et al., 2020)

The impact of environmental knowledge in supporting green consumption is not uniform. The straightforward conclusion that providing more information about the environment increases green consumption was supported by some studies (Bartkus et al., 1999) but not the others (Davies, et al., 2002; Pedersen and Neergaard, 2006; Rustam, et al., 2020). Besides price (“green” goods are still more expensive, making them difficult to afford), the green attitude-behavior gap seems to play a role here (Joshi and Rahman, 2015; Wang et al., 2019b; Witek, 2019).

While the early studies studied primarily economic, demographic, or knowledge factors, the later research proved that attitudes and values are often more important predictors of green consumption than rational choices. (Han, et al., 2007; Carrus et al., 2008; Peattie, 2010; Wang, et al., 2019a). The values are a broad category. One stream of research concentrated on the existing models of values. For example, Schwartz’s value model or altruist values were shown to be related to pro-environmental behavior. However, other studies report the opposite—pro-environmental values increase product reuse and waste-minimization intentions and behaviors but not recycling (Barr, 2007), or pro-environmental values increase the intention to recycle and conserve water but not to buy organic food or avoid leaving appliances on standby (Lyndhurst, 2004). The other studies report that environmental attitudes, environmental knowledge, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, conditional value, and emotional value have a positive effect on green purchase intentions (Nekmahmud, et al., 2022a)

The lower expected effect of pro-environmental values on pro-environmental behavior was explained by the particularities playing more important role (Barr, 2007) or by the impact of economic incentives (Bartelings and Sterner, 1999; Eriksson, 2004; Jackson, 2005; Wang et al., 2021; Shen and Wang, 2022) and the green attitude-behavior gap (Joshi and Rahman, 2015; Wang et al., 2019a; Witek, 2019). The dominant social paradigm (DSP) and cultural/ethnic group norms may reduce the role of the value factors above (Kilbourne, et al., 2002; Johnson et al., 2004; Halder, et al., 2020; Fischer, et al., 2021). For example, consumerism reduces willingness to engage in green consumption (Kilbourne and Polonsky, 2005; Fischer, et al., 2021). Consumption is then viewed as a social process in social, political, and historical contexts, and conditions of lives and lifestyles bear immense importance. All these factors affect green consumption (Connolly and Prothero, 2003; Moisander, 2007; Beatson, et al., 2020; Fischer, et al., 2021). The (pro) environmental behavior may also belong to social norms. For example, recycling may be adopted because it is perceived as normal, Barr (2007), or the existing prices may represent the norm, and greener products represent an expensive luxury (Krystallis and Chryssohoidis, 2005). Similarly, pro-social behavior is showed to influence pro-environmental behavior (Ramkissoon, 2023).

Values can be effective in the case the consumer feels that a change in his behavior can produce a significant change in the environmental outcome, or, oppositely, the current state of the environment is partly caused by his behavior. Understanding personal responsibilities for both causing and solving environmental problems and believing that the action they take can have a meaningful impact was shown to be a significant predictor of pro-environmental behavior (Gupta and Ogden 2009; Yue et al. (2020).

The spatial dimension (local, urban/rural, regional, and national) is the next dimension of factors affecting pro-environmental behavior (Peattie, 2010). The urban and rural differ in waste infrastructure (Munksgaard, et al., 2000), style of housing, agricultural systems, and specific mix of energy sources (Hines and Peattie, 2006), and people’s behavior (Tang, et al., 2022). We can expect different economic incentives in pro-environmental behavior, different local culture and style of life and habits (Empacher and Götz, 2004; Leiserowitz, et al., 2010; Vita, et al., 2019; ElHaffar, et al., 2020; Samkange et al., 2021).

All the perceptions, values and knowledge can be impacted by the mass-media and education. The impact of mass media on pro-environmental values and pro-environmental behavior was shown to be a significant one (Haron et al., 2005; Jain, et al., 2020; Wagdi, et al., 2022). Especially video content that is largely based on emotions has a particular influence on pro-environmental attitudes (Ramkissoon, and Smith, 2014). Social media, as a special case of the mass media, were shown to have a significant positive effect on green consumption intentions promoting attitude, subjective norms, and green thinking via social media marketing (Nekmahmud, et al., 2022b). However, the media is such a complex phenomenon that much of the research on the media’s role in different sustainable actions is still largely missing (Chen et al., 2019).

This paper contributes to the research on the factors affecting green consumption by studying the effect of values and attitudes related to climate change, environment protection, personal possibility to affect environmental outcomes such as climate change, and the sufficiency of information about environmental protection. We add political attitudes such as trust in the European Union and the perceived reasonability of EU integration. In addition, we add more comprehensive research on the effect of media exposure (TV, printed media, radio, internet news, discussions and blogs, social networks, and offline discussions), socio-demographic indicators including sex, gender, education, the standard of living, and town size. The following sections will describe more closely relevant agendas and the existing literature.

Methodologically we rely on Principal component analysis to study the structure of attitudes to environmental protection and climate change. Namely, we are interested in whether the agendas of environmental protection and climate change represent one or two different agendas in the minds of the representative sample of the population in the Czech Republic. In theory, the agenda of climate change represents a subset of the agenda of environmental protection. However, the literature review suggested that according to the media presentation and the non-availability of personal experience, they may present two different agendas.

Second, we conduct ordinal regression analyses to test the factors associated with environmentally conscious behavior according to the scheme presented in Supplementary Appendix S1 (Table 1A); Formula 1. B e h a v i o r i = l o g i t ( a 0 + a 1 − 3 E n v i r o n m e n t + a 4,5 C l i m a t e + a 6 − 8 E U + a 9 − 15 I n f o + a 16 S t a n d a r t + a 17 G e n d e r + a 18 A g e + a 19 P o l i t i c a l   o r i e n t a t i o n + a 20 − 22 E d u c a t i o n + a 23 − 27 T o w n   s i z e + e (1)

Where

Behavior _i –stands for the frequency of conducting environmentally conscious activities consequently (buy organic food, buy locally produced food, when buying products you are guided by whether they are environmentally friendly, hand in, sort your hazardous waste, sort your regular waste, limit car journeys to protect the environment, save energy and water to protect the environment, for the distribution of the respondents see Table 1)

Environment–three variables capturing environment protection attitudes, namely: 1) the extent the environment protection is urgent, 2) the level of satisfaction with the environment in the locality of the respondent, 3) the extent the respondent has sufficient information about how to behave in an environmentally friendly way (for the distribution of the respondents see Table 2)

Climate–stands for two variables reflecting concerns about the effects of climate change and whether the respondents believe that people’s behavior can change climate change (for the distribution of the respondents, see Table 2)

EU–stands for the three variables reflecting the attitude to EU policies: whether European integration in the fields of economy and environment is beneficial or harmful, and the extent to which the respondents trust the EU.

Info–stands for the six variables reflecting the frequency the respondents follow social life in the following media: TV, printed newspapers and magazines, radio, online news serves, social networks, and offline discussions (for the distribution of the respondents, see Table 3).

Standard–subjective standard of living of the respondents (very good to very bad, five-point scale).

Gender and Age–stands for the gender and age of the respondents.

Political orientation–political orientation (left-right, eleven-point scale).

Education–education dummies (primary, secondary w/o state exam, secondary with state exam, higher; higher education is reference variable).

Town size–dummies for subjective town size (big city, suburb of big city, average town, small town, big village, small village).

The bivariate correlations between the variables above are presented in Supplementary Appendix S1.

Green purchases are indispensable for environmental protection and combatting climate change. The relevant information is, in most cases, distributed to the general public via education, mass media, green marketing, certification, and labeling. In Europe, the EU plays a major role in determining environmental policies and the provision of relevant certificates.

The existing literature established that attitudes to environmental protection and climate change, among other factors such as values, beliefs, lifestyles, and orientations, significantly affect the propensity of the population for green purchasing (Wijekoon and Sabri, 2021), though certain green attitude-behavior gap (Wang, et al., 2019b; Witek, 2019), limits the applicability of these findings. On the other hand, the intention to purchase and the purchase itself are shown to be driven by the same determinants (Janssen, 2018). In this field, research on the media’s role in green purchases is still largely missing (Chen et al., 2019).

This paper studied the effects of attitudes to environmental protection, climate change concerns, and EU integration, and mass media (traditional and new ones) on the reported frequency of green purchases of households. Predictably, environmental attitudes and climate concerns positively predicted green purchases. The EU integration was the most important in the sense of environmental integration.

However, the most problematic effects were shown on the side of mass media as the exposure to TV and social networks diminished green purchasing. We suggest that information bubbles that polarize opinions (most frequent in social networks) cause this unfortunate outcome (see also Pearce et al., 2019). Besides the content, the negative effect of TV might be caused by significant self-selection or inappropriate advertisement that primarily emphasize the price Both of these effects need to be studied. In any case, more efforts must be made by the TV and social networks to increase the population’s awareness on green products.

The impact of the paper is twofold. First, the paper contributes to the empirical literature on green consumption by analyzing value, information, and media factors affecting green consumption. Second, the paper poses significant problems to policymakers and media experts. As exposition to TV and social networks was shown to diminish green consumption, policymakers and journalists need to concentrate on these two media channels to reverse the unfavorable trends. Especially video-content, so vital for green consumption intentions (Ramkissoon and Smith, 2014), should be analyzed and modified accordingly in these two media outlets.