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International communities are in general agreement that fulfilling environmental goals for a sustainable future is only possible with the reduction of consumptions’ detrimental effects. This, however, requires a deep understanding of the factors affecting environmentally significant consumer behaviors, such as buying ecologically friendly products, recycling, using household energy vigilantly, or driving less frequently. In recent years, we see an increasing number of studies in behavioral research looking at environmental attitudes, values, and behavior that try to understand relationships with different variables from different theoretical perspectives. These studies, however, largely lack an overarching perspective that considers variety of theories and behaviors with a comparative approach. As such, this study tries to fill this gap by exploring the functioning of consumer behavior in the environmental domain with a comparative approach, which is needed to uncover every aspect of the forces behind environmentally significant behaviors of consumers. Mainly, this study examines the explanatory power of the three theories, Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Value-Belief-Norm (VBN), and Theory on Affect (TA), which focus on gain motives, moral concerns, and hedonic motives, respectively, and compares with each other for three different stages of consumption, namely, purchase, usage, and post-use behaviors.

Consumers spend less than 90 s making up their minds about a product after their initial interaction with it. Most of their assessments in this short amount of time are based on the visual attributes of the products. The overall purpose of this study is to take the first step toward understanding consumer attitudes toward environmental claims on packages by using low- and high-involvement products and then determining how different product claims (verbal and visual) affect their decision-making processes. Specifically, based on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), this study examines consumer responses to environmental verbal statements and green visual components of product packages. The research utilizes a 2 (claim: eco-friendly or high performance) × 2 (color: green or yellow) factorial experiment (n = 256) to understand how packaging elements can affect buying decisions of consumers by varying product packaging on both high-involvement (laptop computer) and low-involvement (dishwashing detergent) products. The results show that green color packaging elicits better attitudes than nongreen for low-involvement products because these products are perceived as being more environmentally friendly. The results also demonstrated that for the eco-friendly claim, the color-product fit was significantly higher for green products than nongreen products. However, for performance claim (i.e., Ultra Clean), the results did not show any significant difference in terms of color-product fit. Also, for the high-involvement product claims, the study results did not show any significant difference in consumer responses.

Sustainable business development has moved into the social fabric of corporations alongside historical parameters of business performance such as profit margins and return on investment. The transition to envelope a mindset beyond profits has been supported by initiatives founded by the United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goals and more recently the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, sustainable business development faces challenges in both emerging and developed nations to infuse corporate social responsibility and innovation to address current environmental conditions that endanger public health. The UN suggests that to achieve these measures will require new economic paradigms, behavioral pattern changes in corporate and consumer consumption of natural resources, adaptive policy, and commitments to limit resource use. This chapter defines the evolution of sustainability and presents key components from a business perspective. Next, the impact of business environmental sustainability on public health is discussed using several examples of how corporations address important problems such as e-waste, natural habitat conservation, and employee safety and health. From there, we review management tools to assess sustainability providing insight to corporate business ventures that are best aligned with SDGs. Finally, we summarize key points of the material and present a high-level list of best practices.