Ecological footprint of your denim jeans: production knowledge and green consumerism

Abstract

Every pair of denim jeans produced contributes 33.4 kg of CO 2 into the atmosphere, consumes 3781 L of water, and occupies 12 m 2 of land to support its production. The consumption patterns and consumption behaviour of consumers are both vital determinants of their environmental performance and impact. This paper examines the environmental concerns, production knowledge, and related cognitive measures of consumers by mapping their intentions in the process of buying denim jeans. Consumers of denim jeans in mainland China were taken as a sample to achieve our research objective. Specifically, 1392 respondents were quantitatively investigated. The empirical results indicate that production knowledge, the ascription of responsibility, buying attitude, and personal norms are dominant factors in explaining consumers' buying intentions when purchasing denim jeans. Furthermore, we find that the relationship between cognitive factors and buying intentions is mediated by affordability. This study highlights the immediate need to measure the denim industry's ecological footprint (during the production phase) and communicate this to critical industry stakeholders (i.e. macro-level forces, environmentalists, current and potential consumers). The intention is to redefine the purchasing behaviour of future consumers of denim jeans.

Prioritizing customer requirements for men’s denim jeans through factor analysis and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process

“…Moreover, consumers' apparel purchasing decision is directly affected by apparel attributes such as practical good looks, value for quality and comfortable fit (Wu and Chalip, 2014). These relationships are well-established in the literature (Asmi et al, 2022;Kumar, 2019) while understanding how consumers evaluate the quality of clothing products and develop a favourable condition for purchasing is attracting the attention of researchers (Chen et al, 2021) in different contexts (Rahman et al, 2019).…”

“…It is becoming more popular as casual wear and is worn nowadays, even in business settings, by different people of all ages including youth and adults (Mustapha and Roslan, 2021). Despite its popularity, denim jeans production has a huge ecological impact which calls for responsible production and consumption (Asmi et al, 2022). One way of achieving this objective is to understand customer needs, minimize the production of denim jeans which consumers do not buy and promote a slow fashion design model (Nergis et al, 2017).…”

“…It is becoming more popular as casual wear and is worn nowadays, even in business settings, by different people of all ages including youth and adults (Mustapha and Roslan, 2021). Despite its popularity, denim jeans production has a huge ecological impact which calls for responsible production and consumption (Asmi et al. , 2022).…”

What matters for sustainability and climate change actions in developing countries: A stimulus–organism–behavior– consequence (SOBC) perspective

“…The complexity of climate change, at both scientific and political levels, makes it challenging (Keren et al, 2021). It leads to controversies because it is tough to distinguish the differences over a short period as climate change trends are masked by normal variability (Asmi et al, 2022). Thus, individuals with substantial environmental knowledge and concerns sometimes find translating these traits into sustainable actions challenging (Munerah et al, 2018).…”