[From: Guardian Unlimited]
James Randerson, Science Correspondent
As Neil Sedaka crooned, breaking up is hard to do, but it is also disastrous for the environment. In 12 countries around the world, divorces that took place around the start of the millennium resulted in 7.4 million more households as people chose to live apart, a study has found. The researchers say that the global trend towards more marriages breaking up is leading to increased consumption.
Based on trends in census data, the UK government predicts that the number of households in England will have increased by 3.8 million between 2001 and 2021 – an increase of 17%. According to the new study that will mean a significant increase in resource use.
Using data from the US for 2005, the researchers found that split households resulting from divorce spent 46% more on electricity and 56% more on water overall. If their resource use had stayed the same as married households, the country would have used 73 billion kilowatt-hours less electricity and 627 billion gallons less water – nine times the volume of Lake Windermere.
“Divorce escalates consumption of increasingly limited resources (water, land and energy) through household proliferation and reduction in household size,” Eunice Yu and Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University write in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Using data from 12 countries, including the US, Mexico, Brazil and Greece, the team estimates that there are typically 1.1 to 1.8 fewer people in an average divorced household compared with an average married household. The number of rooms per person in divorced households is between 33% and 95% higher than in married households.
Other factors such as marrying later, fewer multigenerational households and more couples without children are also driving the global trend towards more households.
Tags: war, Environment <BR/>