Divorce Is Hard on Environment, Study Says

Randolph E. Schmid in Washington
Associated Press

December 4, 2007

Divorce can be bad for the environment, because it tends to result in more households and less sharing of resources, according to a study published this week.

Divorce rates are rising around the world, 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 use more 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 uses the same power whether one person is home or several are. Two people living apart run two dishwashers, instead of just one.

"People have been talking about how to protect the environment and combat climate change," Liu said. "Divorce is an overlooked factor that needs to be considered."

It Adds Up

Liu, who researches the relationship between ecology and 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.

Divorced households spend more per person per month for electricity compared with married households, because in married households it's more likely that multiple people watch the same television, listen to the same radio, cook on the same stove, or eat under the same lights.

That means some 6.9 billion U.S. dollars in extra utility costs per year, Liu calculated, plus an added 3.6 billion U.S. 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, including Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico, and South Africa between 1998 and 2002.

If divorced households in these countries alone had combined to include the same average household size as married households, there would have been a million fewer energy- and water-consuming households.

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."

Living in a traditional household is not the only way to reap these savings—Shaker communities and even hippie communes are more efficient than living alone.

Less People, More Households

Liu was studying the ecology of areas with declining population and noticed that even where the total number of people was less, the number of households was increasing. He wondered why.

The answers, he found, seems to be divorce, demographic shifts—such as people remaining single longer—and the demise of multigenerational households.

"We found the proportion of divorced households has increased rapidly across the globe," he said.

So he set out to measure the difference divorce makes in terms of energy and water, land use, and construction materials.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Free Email News Updates
Sign up for our Inside National Geographic newsletter. Every two weeks we'll send you our top stories and pictures (see sample).