Paper Meets Plastic: The Perceived Environmental Friendliness of Product Packaging
TATIANA SOKOLOVA ARADHNA KRISHNA TIM DO¨ RING
Packaging waste makes up more than 10% of the landfilled waste in the United States. While consumers often want to make environmentally friendly product choices, we find that their perceptions of the environmental friendliness of product packaging may systematically deviate from its objective environmental friendliness. Eight studies ( N ¼ 4,103) document the perceived environmental friendliness (PEF) bias whereby consumers judge plastic packaging with additional paper to be more environmentally friendly than identical plastic packaging without the paper. The PEF bias is driven by consumers’ “paper ¼ good, plastic ¼ bad” beliefs and by propor- tional reasoning, wherein packaging with a greater paper-to-plastic proportion is judged as more environmentally friendly. We further show that the PEF bias impacts consumers’ willingness to pay and product choice. Importantly, this bias can be miti- gated by a “minimal packaging sticker” intervention, which increases the environmen- tal friendliness perceptions of plastic-only packaging, rendering plastic-packaged products to be preferable to their plastic-plus-paper-packaged counterparts. This research contributes to the packaging literature in marketing and to research on sus- tainability while offering practical implications for managers and public policy officials.
Keywords : sustainability, packaging, cognitive biases, heuristics
W aste from packaging poses a serious environmental problem. The US Environmental Protection Agency reports that there were more than 80 million tons of pack- aging produced in 2018, with two-thirds of this packaging made of plastic or paper. Once the packaging is no longer in use, some of it is recycled, but much of it ends up in Tatiana Sokolova (t.sokolova@tilburguniversity.edu) is an assistant professor of marketing at the Tilburg School of Economics and Management, 5037 AB Tilburg, Netherlands. Aradhna Krishna (aradhna@umich.edu) is the Dwight F. Benton Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. Tim Do¨ring (tim.doring@maastrichtuniversity.nl) is an assistant professor of marketing at the School of Business and Economics, Maastricht University, 6211 LM Maastricht, Netherlands. Please address correspondence to Tatiana Sokolova or Aradhna Krishna. The authors thank the editor, the associate editor, and three reviewers for their guid- ance. The authors also thank Yesim Orhun and Max Pachali for their feed- back and advice on statistical analyses; Maura Scott for suggesting the intervention manipulation; and Tetiana Bychkova for gathering the pack- aging images from the Spanish market. This research has benefited from feedback at various seminars and conferences, including seminars at
landfills. In 2018 alone, landfilled plastic and paper pack- aging waste amounted to 10.09 and 6.44 million tons, respectively, accounting for 11% of the total landfilled waste in the United States (United States Environmental Protection Agency 2020). Despite the potential environmental and financial bene- fits of reducing excessive packaging (Deutsch 2007; Elgaa¨ıed-Gambier 2016), many products remain Baruch College, Drexel University, Florida State University, Northeastern University, University of Miami, Marketing in Israel conference, and from discussions at the Tilburg School of Economics and Management Consumer Club. Supplementary materials are included in the web appen- dix accompanying the online version of this article.
Editor: Markus Giesler
Associate Editor: Oleg Urminsky
Advance Access publication January 28, 2023
V C The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com Vol. 50 2023 https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucad008
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