Sustainable consumption is a crucial contributor to sustainable development. Often, environmental policy approaches to promote sustainable consumption rely on increasing the awareness of consumers through information provision. Hence, it is important to know what kind of people the sustainability information is likely to reach, and what kind of people would need to be reached by other means in order to green their consumption. We advance the question of the characteristics of consumers who look for information about sustainability when making grocery purchasing choices. We focus on value‐based buying behaviour of Millennials, drawing from consumer surveys carried out in Finland, Hong Kong and Spain. The results show that values differ between the studied nationalities, but when modelling how values affect the pro‐responsibility behaviour the effect of nationality vanishes. Also, high perception of one's own sustainability related behaviour seems to enable altruistic, self‐directed people to act on environmental concern. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

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Consumption is essentially an institutional action. While both the formal institutional environment and cultural embeddedness shape consumption, individuals may reciprocally amend the institutional setting through consumption choices that challenge the prevalent institutional constraints. This paper reconciles theoretical and conceptual premises from institutional and practice theory literature to study the sustainability of consumption. Using institutional ethnography as a methodological approach, the study explores the pendulum between embeddedness and agency in shaping the sustainability of day-to-day consumption of necessary goods; and further, how the external institutional environment may interact with human behaviour to contribute towards sustainability. The study finds a hierarchy of informal institutions, each level of which interacts differently with external changes. For example, sustainability is found to be more widespread the more it is embedded in practices, and this is a result of overall institutional development beyond regulation and choice editing. The results also highlight the importance of understanding unintentional sustainability in consumption practices.

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