Divorce Bad for the Environment

During my last move, I was told by the owner of the moving company I hired that his largest source of business nowadays are wives leaving the home after separating from their husbands. They will get an apartment or rent another home. A recent item in the news shows that high rates of marital separation and divorce is bad for the environment!

Divorce Bad for the Environment
The surging divorce rate worldwide is hurting the environment, since it results in increased consumption of limited resources. Divorce leads to more households, decreased household size, and higher consumption per head, says a study printed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Divorced households in the [United States] could have saved more than 38 million rooms, 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, and 627 billion gallons [2,400,000,000,000 l] of water in 2005 alone if their resource-use efficiency had been comparable to married households.” In the year 2000, there were 6.1 million “resource-inefficient” households of this kind in the United States.