Abstract
The rapid transformation of production and consumption has heightened environmental pressures, and reducing waste has become an important priority. Alternatives to single-use packaging, including reusable packaging, are increasingly considered, yet adoption remains uneven and not fully understood across cultural and economic contexts. This thesis asks how consumers in Bangladesh and New Zealand evaluate and adopt reusable packaging in everyday life, and how personal values shape the meaning and weight of the same evaluative concerns across these two cultural contexts.
The thesis focuses on three consumer-facing formats: refill packs (refill-at-home), refill stations (refill-on-the-go), and returnable packaging, using a qualitative, cross-cultural design. Forty semi-structured soft-laddering interviews (20 per country) were analysed using Means-End Chain (MEC) analysis to trace Attributes-Consequences-Values (A-C-V) links. The Theory of Consumption Values (TCV) identified how consumers evaluated product-level aspects of reusable packaging, while Schwartz’s basic human values explained how personal value priorities shaped the interpretation and relative importance of these evaluations. Implication matrices and hierarchical value maps (HVMs) supported structured comparison across formats and countries.
Across both countries, participants evaluated reuse through similar concerns, including cost, feasibility, hygiene, trust, access, and waste reduction. Among the Bangladeshi participants, judgements were more often interpreted through household stability, risk avoidance, and care for close others, with public visibility reducing willingness to participate. Among the New Zealand participants, similar judgements were interpreted through autonomy, fairness, and proportionality, with reuse supported when it fit existing routines without hidden burdens. In both contexts, environmental concern was widely expressed but became behaviourally influential only when reusable packaging systems were perceived as workable, trustworthy, and routine-compatible.
This research extends the Theory of Consumption Values in two ways. First, it shows that the same consumption value category carries different meaning depending on which personal value a consumer brings to the evaluation, rather than a fixed, self-interpreting meaning. Second, it shows that consumption values are not all evaluated together: some values must be resolved before others become relevant at all, rather than every value making a smaller or larger contribution to the same decision. This ordering is shaped by personal value priorities embedded in broader cultural contexts.