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1. Introduction
In the past few decades, rapid technological advancements, materialistic consumption patterns, natural resource depletion and population explosion have led to planet-wide massive environmental deterioration, which has resulted primarily from human activities (Capstick et al., 2015; Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 2012). Growing awareness about environmental difficulties and its implications have brought about changes in the consumption patterns among the young consumers in emerging markets (Adnan et al., 2017; Jaiswal and Singh, 2017; Kautish and Sharma, 2019). Environmental changes affect individuals irrespective of their age; young people are believed to bear the substantial burden as they will live longer compared to the older ones and will, therefore, face challenges throughout their lifetime (Naderi and Steenburg, 2018). The younger generation promotes a positive change by sharing environmental information (Allen and Spialek, 2018; Prakash et al., 2018), responsible consumption (Agrawal and Gupta, 2018) and embracing contemporary value orientation for climate improvement and adaptations (Quoquab et al., 2019; United Nations, 2018). In addition, young people in today’s times are more willing to buy green products (Uddin and Khan, 2018; Yadav and Pathak, 2016a, 2016b).
In India, young people constitute a major consumer group (Central Statistics Office, 2017). However, these individuals are disappointed with the consumer-led societies that prevail around; hence, they constantly seek alternative lifestyles beyond materialistic pursuits (Kautish and Soni, 2012; Prakash and Pathak, 2017). Nelms et al. (2017) investigated the differences among young people (aged 12-17) who identify themselves as adolescent environmentalists. These young people have different environmental values, account for greater self-confidence and display stronger citizenship behavior. Younger people tend to hold a more environmentally positive attitude than older people (Boeve-de Pauw and Petegem, 2010; Kanchanapibul et al., 2014; Wang, 2014). Allen and Spialek (2018) developed sustainability materiality index for millennials to understand their product purchase decisions considering environmental footprints, pro-environmental orientation and green word-of-mouth information. Hitherto, all research provide evident that environmental values are imperious for green purchase behavior (Aoyagi-Usui, 2001; Kautish and Dash, 2017; Kautish and Sharma, 2018), which is emphasized considering rising consumers’ environmental awareness in emerging markets (Nguyen et al., 2017; Pham et al., 2018; Yadav and Pathak, 2016a, 2016b). Consumers’ decisions are based on a diverse set of value orientations incorporating social and environmental...