Boomerang Effect: How Sustainable Disposal Options Spur Green Consumers to Overconsume

One co-author’s mother cheerily donates her clothing to a local charity and revels in her quarterly yard sales. She reports her deep affinity for the environment and avoidance of waste, akin to the set of consumers whose values center on environmental responsibility, reduction of waste and consideration of planetary resources (Haws, Winterich, and Naylor 2014). After donating her clothes to a local charity or hosting her yard sales, however, she usually comes home with armloads of new purchases. Does a sustainable disposal option, such as donating or selling, lead consumers to buy more new items? Disposal and dispossession practices are among the most understudied fields in marketing and consumer behavior (MacInnis and Folkes 2010). The present research investigates the effect of disposal on subsequent consumption decisions and contributes to the literature on disposal and sustainable consumption. Specifically, we explore how disposal justifies consumption of new items for consumers whose values center on environmental responsibility (hereafter, “green consumers”). Our goal is to determine when and why the attitudes-behavior gap in sustainable consumption might ironically widen for green consumers (Haws et al. 2014). In particular, we focus our lens on disposal and dispossession practices such as donation and selling of used goods to understand the downstream impacts of this particular set of sustainable behavior, which delays the arrival of the product to the dump or rubbish bin (Phipps et al. 2013). We propose that green consumers who are the most focused on avoiding waste in their consumption (Haws et al. 2014) will be licensed by disposal and dispossession options that are perceived as producing the least amount of waste on the environment.