World News

If you were to take a trip 70 or more years into the past you would be surprised to see that divorce was not a common practice for people. In fact it was a disgraceful thing to contemplate let alone go through with. Yet, in our day and age it seems that every other person has been divorced at least once sometimes twice.

We all know that divorce can affect any children involved – but what we didn’t know was that it can also hurt the environment. In countries around the world divorce rates have been rising, and each time a family dissolves the result is two new households.

“A married household actually uses resources more efficiently than a divorced household,” said Jianguo Liu, an ecologist at Michigan State University whose analysis of the environmental impact of divorce appears in this week’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. More households means more use of land, water and energy, three critical resources, Liu explained in a telephone interview.

Households with fewer people are simply not as efficient as those with more people sharing, he explained. A household uses the same amount of heat or air conditioning whether there are two or four people living there. A refrigerator used the same power whether there is one person home or several. Two people living apart run two dishwashers, instead of just one.

Liu, who researches the relationship of ecology with social sciences, said people seem surprised by his findings at first, and then consider it simple. “A lot of things become simple after the research is done,” he said. Some extra energy or water use may not sound like a big deal, but it adds up.

The United States, for example, had 16.5 million households headed by a divorced person in 2005 and just over 60 million households headed by a married person. Per person, divorced households spent more per person per month for electricity compared with a married household, as multiple people can be watching the same television, listening to the same radio, cooking on the same stove and or eating under the same lights. That means some $6.9 billion in extra utility costs per year, Liu calculated, plus an added $3.6 billion for water, in addition to other costs such as land use. And it isn’t just the United States.

Liu looked at 11 other countries such as Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico and South Africa between 1998 and 2002. In the 11, if divorced households had combined to have the same average household size as married households, there could have been a million fewer households using energy and water in these countries.

“People have been talking about how to protect the environment and combat climate change, but divorce is an overlooked factor that needs to be considered,” Liu said. Liu stressed that he isn’t condemning divorce: “Some people really need to get divorces.” But, he added, “one way to be more environmentally friendly is to live with other people and that will reduce the impact.”