How psychological and contextual barriers to environmentally sustainable consumption vary across domains: A comparative study of food, electronics, and clothing in Switzerland

Background: Despite growing environmental awareness, significant gaps persist between environmentally sustainable consumption intentions and behaviors. Most research examines barriers to environmentally sustainable consumption either in general or within a single consumption domain. Objective: This study compares perceived contextual (such as price, availability, trust) and psychological barriers (change unnecessary, conflicting goals and aspirations, interpersonal relations, lack of knowledge, and tokenism) to environmentally sustainable consumption across three major domains—food, electronics, and clothing—to understand how these determine perceived behavioral barriers and their relationship to self-reported behaviors in the acquisition phase. Methods: Data were collected as part of a national survey on environmentally sustainable consumption in food, portable consumer electronics, and clothing. We analyzed responses from 1136 Swiss residents. Participants reported pro-environmental behaviors and contextual barriers across all three domains and were then randomly assigned to complete additional psychological barrier questions for one domain. Analyses addressed three research questions by comparing behavioral engagement and barrier patterns across domains and examining the relationship between psychological barriers and self-reported behavior within each domain. Results: Environmentally sustainable behaviors were most prevalent in the food domain, despite participants reporting the strongest perceived barriers, particularly with respect to high prices (53% vs. 34% in electronics and 40% in clothes). Psychological barriers varied significantly across domains, with food showing higher interpersonal relations barriers but lower knowledge barriers compared to electronics and clothing. Electronics consistently showed the lowest engagement across comparable behaviors, while environmentally sustainable clothing faced unique availability constraints (17% vs. 10% in electronics). Discussion and conclusions: Environmentally sustainable consumption needs to be understood not only as an abstract concept but also as a domain-specific phenomenon. Food consumption benefits from high awareness but faces contextual price barriers and challenges in social coordination. Electronics purchases suffer from fundamental ambiguity regarding sustainability criteria and infrequent purchase cycles, which limit learning opportunities. Clothing purchases navigate concerns about identity expression alongside availability constraints. These findings demonstrate that effective interventions must align with each domain's unique decision context, addressing price structures in the food area, information systems in the electronics field, and availability infrastructure in the clothing sector—rather than applying one-size-fits-all approaches.