Social Responsibility, Sustainability, Policy and Consumer Culture Theory: TOWARD A ZERO-WASTE LIFESTYLE: HOW CONSUMERS’ MOTIVATION SHAPES THEIR PERCEIVED VALUE?

The zero-waste lifestyle is a promising approach to respond effectively to the environmental issues. However major questions raise related to the acceptance of this new lifestyle by the consumers and their intention to make efforts and sacrifices in pursuing this goal. Despite its interest, perceived sacrifice has not been dealt with in depth particularly in the literature related to zero-waste practices ZWPs (i.e. reduce, reuse and recycle). This research aims to offer a better understanding of the concept from the perspective of consumers, emphasizing its antecedents (motivation) and determine whether and how sacrifice along with perceived benefit affect ZWPs. We conducted a quantitative study with 241 participants in France. Results showed that the level of motivation (autonomous, controlled, amotivation) frames differently the perception of sacrifices: as a positive transcendence for the highly motivated individuals and as a negative loss for the less motivated, leading to bivalent consequences on consumer's adoption of ZWPs. The positive effect of sacrifice is original for the marketing literature which is interested in pro-environmental behavior and more particularly in the zero-waste context.