Domestic Consumer Awareness of Energy Consumption Practices in Pakistan

Abstract

Electricity waste is a bottleneck in availing clean, green, uninterrupted, and sustainable electricity supply. The synthesis of the studied literature portrays that irresponsible behavior indulges consumers to take irresponsible action, which leads to electricity waste and crisis. Therefore, to get the know-how of irresponsible behavior, this study aims to investigate the role of awareness concerning electricity consumption, wastage, gadget efficiency, and conservation. A questionnaire-focused survey was carried out to collect data and performed descriptive analysis to critically evaluate the data. The results explicate that consumers possess a low level of wasteful consumption awareness and "lack-of-information" is a big issue in waste management. Thus, the study concludes that unawareness is the key determinant that creates and strengthens a sense of irresponsibility in consumer behavior. The academician and practitioners need dire attention to take precautionary measures for developing prominent awareness campaigns and strategic policy guidelines to distort irresponsible human nature by including fearful promotional contents in marketing campaigns.

Does wastophobia bring sustainability in consumers’ responsible behavior? A case of electricity waste management

“…This study is empirically testing the intriguing wastophobia model presented by Hanif et al (2021aHanif et al ( , 2021b. Phobia is a primary human emotion that affect human behavior persistently (Nabi and Myrick, 2019) to defend or cope from danger, aversive or threatening conditions (Misslin, 2003).…”

“…A major portion of electricity supplied to domestic sector is used on wasteful activities (Rafique and Rehman, 2017). The wasteful consumption share of domestic sector due to irresponsible behavior is more than 30% to 45% in Pakistan (Khan and Ashraf, 2015; Samaa Digital, 2016: Hanif et al , 2021a, 2021b), while this ratio is approximately 23% in China (Sheng and Guo, 2018). So far, various behavioral strategies including electricity prices (Chen, 2017), education (Saini, 2018), energy tax (Mills and Schleich, 2010), role of incentives (Edelman, 2015), technology (Grønhøj and Thøgersen, 2011), Hawthorne effect (Schwartz et al , 2013) and energy games (Herrmann et al , 2017) have been deployed to manage consumer behavior.…”

“…Collins (2019) determines irresponsible actions which are taken without considering the final consequences. Hanif et al (2021aHanif et al ( , 2021b discussed in their study that irresponsible actions are not only those which are taken without considering the consequences e.g. keeping efficient appliances on standby mode (Bertoldi, 2015) or utilization inefficient appliances (Thakur et al, 2017) at home.…”