Divorce is not green

Increasing divorce rates has created more households with fewer people, has taken up more space and has gobbled up more energy and water, according to Jack Liu and Eunice Yu at Michigan State University.

When they calculated the cost in terms of increased utilities and unused housing space per capita, they discovered that divorce tosses out economy of scale. Among the findings:

• In the United States alone in 2005, divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved had household size remained the same as that of married households. Thirty-eight million extra rooms were needed with associated costs for heating and lighting.
• In the United States and 11 other countries such as Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico and South Africa between 1998 and 2002, if divorced households had combined to have the same average household size as married households, there could have been 7.4 million fewer households in these countries.
• The numbers of divorced households in these countries ranged from 40,000 in Costa Rica to almost 16 million in the United States around 2000.

The research shows that environmental policy is more complex than one single solution, Liu said. Governments across the world may need to start factoring in divorce when examining environmental policy, Liu said.

“Solutions are beyond a single idea,” Liu said. “Consider the production of biofuel. Biofuel is made from plants, which also require water and space. We’re showing divorce has significant competition for that water and space. On the other hand, more divorce demands more energy. This creates a challenging dilemma and requires more creative solutions.”

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

-- Kelli