Green technostress and the environmental consciousness paradox in sustainable electronics consumption

This study introduces “green technostress,” a phenomenon in which environmentally conscious consumers experience psychological strain from navigating complex digital platforms for sustainable electronics purchases. Grounded in conservation of resources theory, this novel construct developed, validated, and tested a comprehensive model using partial least squares-structural equation modeling with 427 electronics consumers. The findings demonstrate that environmental consciousness, rather than straightforwardly promoting sustainable purchasing, instead heightens green technostress (β = 0.52, p < 0.001), which in turn erodes both consumer well-being (β = −0.44) and sustainable purchase behavior (β = −0.38); information overload and decision complexity together account for 47.5% of this effect. This reveals a counterintuitive mechanism: environmental consciousness itself, not merely cost or convenience, can suppress the very behavior it is meant to encourage (direct effect β = −0.19). This paper shows that sustainability communication is currently misdirected: consumers attend heavily to visible attributes such as packaging (M = 5.68) while largely overlooking invisible digital impacts such as server energy and data mining (M = 2.31), yet it is only attention to these invisible impacts that predicts sustainable behavior (β = 0.41). Digital literacy, retailer support, and environmental self-efficacy each partially buffer these effects, indicating that both individual competence and retailer information design matter. Collectively, these findings challenge the assumption that environmental consciousness reliably facilitates sustainable consumption and instead show how digital information environments can paradoxically work against the behaviors they are intended to support, carrying direct implications for how retailers design sustainability information, how policymakers regulate digital disclosure, and how sustainability theory conceptualizes the consumer decision process.