Study Shows that Divorce is Bad for the Environment

With all the attention on making things 'green' these days, people are trying to do all they can to help the environment. Many of us have turned to recycling and driving hybrid cars, recognizing that small efforts can add up. In our search for ways to help the environment, the results of a recent study come up with a surprising recommendation: stay married.

The results of a study published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences report that remaining married is better for the environment than divorce. In essence, when families have two homes that have to be heated and cooled they are using more energy resources than single-home families. In addition, having more homes contributes to urban sprawl and creates a larger environmental footprint.

Jiangue Lui and Eunice Yu, of the Fisheries and Wildlife Department at Michigan State University studied the change in the size of the environmental footprint of families who had divorced then remarried. They found that in 2005, divorced households in the US used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water over what would have been needed as a single married household. Thirty-eight million extra rooms required heating, cooling, and lighting. They also report that there would have been 7.4 million less homes between 1998 and 2002 had people in these homes remained married. Finally, the per capita number of rooms for divorced individuals ranged from 33 to 95 percent more than in married households.

All this adds up to billions of dollars in additional energy costs and wasted space. The US is not the only country for which this holds true. The authors studied many South and Central American countries and found a similar trend.

People are becoming more concerned with the size of their environmental footprint. We are buying hybrid cars, recycling, and turning down our thermostats. The government, in the meantime, is spending research dollars in an attempt to find more efficient and cleaner energy sources. While are these are worthwhile efforts, it may behoove us to examine the importance of remaining married and in a single home.

Lui and Yu do not hold the morality of marriage and divorce up for question. There are instances when divorce is certainly warranted and preferable to remaining married. It simply boils down to the fact that when people live together they use fewer resources, which is ultimately better for the environment. The demise of marriage can be as much to blame as the fact that households are no longer multi-generational, as they used to be.

Source:http://www.csis.msu.edu/Publication%20files/PNAS_divorce_environment.pdf