This study was executed to deduce the factors affecting eco-friendly behaviors and attitudes, to analyse the difference of eco-friendly behaviors and attitudes between countries, and to draw the variables affecting clothing recycling behavior. The sample comprised people from the UK, China, South Korea. The results were as follows. The four factors related to eco-friendly behaviors and the five factors related to eco-friendly attitudes were derived from the results of factor analysis. In the case of eco-friendly behaviors, four eco-friendly behavior factors showed a significant difference all according to gender and country. In the case of eco-friendly attitudes, saving of natural resources for eco-friendly life, recycling for eco-friendly life, and individual preference for eco-friendly life showed a significant according to gender, also recycling for eco-friendly life, individual preference for eco-friendly life, social awareness for eco-friendly life, and company’s awareness for eco-friendly life showed a significant difference according to country. All of the variables related to clothing recycling behaviors showed the significant difference according to gender and countries. It was verified that the stronger the behaviors or attitudes for waste recycling and environmental protection, individual preference for eco-friendly life, saving of natural resources, buying eco-friendly products, and separate collection for recycling, the more positive the action to clothing recycling. The results of this study will be helpful to establish a marketing strategy for each country and to deduce a plan to attract clothing recycling form people.

For decades, marketing practitioners and scholars have envisioned that environmental characteristics of market offerings will become an important consumer concern (Grant 2007; Henion 1981; Kassarjian 1971; Kotler 2011; Ottmann 2011) and a myriad of consumer surveys indicated that consumers are willing to change their purchase and consumption habits for a better environment (Banikarim 2010; Ferguson and Goldman 2010; Imkamp 2000; Laroche, Bergeron and Barbaro-Forleo 2001). However, consumers’ actual adoption of environmental market offerings has been far below what had been expected and predicted so far (Connolly et al. 2006; Davis 1993; do Paço and Varejâo 2010; Kilbournes 1998; Horne 2009). To bridge the gap between consumers’ stated interests in and attitudes regarding adoption of eco-friendly market offerings and their actual adoption of eco-friendly market offerings, marketers need an accurate understanding of: 1) what determines consumers’ willingness and propensity to adopt eco-friendly market offerings and consumption behaviors, 2) how those individual, social, and marketing determinants of eco-friendly consumer behaviors are interrelated with each other, 3) where consumers stand currently in terms of those determinants, and 4) what needs to be done to remove the bottlenecks in the adoption and diffusion processes. To provide answers to above four aspects of eco-friendly consumer behaviors, this paper attempts to advance a more theoretically-based and comprehensive model of eco-friendly consumer behavior than extant models by incorporating recent findings of research on determinants of pro-environmental consumer behaviors and integrating various relevant theories of attitude-behavior links including the value-belief-norm theory, the theory of reasoned action, and the elaboration likelihood model. The structural validity and generalizability of the proposed model is tested based on two sets of survey data collected from consumers in the U.S. Midwest region and a metropolitan area surrounding Seoul, the capital city of Korea. The findings of the empirical study demonstrate that while the proposed model explains eco-friendly consumer behaviors by both the U.S. and Korean consumers, the relative importance of the predictors of eco-friendly consumer behaviors vary between the two groups of consumers. The analysis of the data also reveals that consumers in the two groups differ significantly from each other on many variables which are included as direct and indirect determinants of eco-friendly consumer behaviors in the proposed model. Together, the findings provide interesting and practical implications for strategies to facilitate consumer adoption of eco-friendly market offerings.