The impact that divorce has on environment has been taken into consideration in a recent study organized by the Michigan State University. People who get divorced can thus be considered responsible of global warming, for example. 

The reason sustaining this affirmation is that divorced couples and marriages move into different homes after their divorce, which leads to more space occupied, more energy burned and more water consumed as compared to when they were together as a family.

38 million more rooms have to be thus provided with light, heat and cool, as shown by the report. In addition, 734 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity would have been saved in 2005 alone if people wouldn't have gotten a divorce. 

Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University stated: “Divorced households are smaller than married households, but consume more land, water, and energy per person than married households.”

Furthermore, when a marriage is ended, possessions are also doubled, as using the same objects is out of the question. The authors of the study said: “Divorce escalates consumption of increasingly limited resources.” 

However, it has been shown by the study that the damage caused by divorce can somehow be repaired if divorces find someone new to share their lives with. 

The National Marriage Project at Rutgers University has swhown that divorce rates are continuously increasing all over the world, whereas they are decreasing in North America. 

46 percent of marriages are ended with a divorce in the United States, the seventh highest rate in the world, according to Divorce Magazine. However, Sweden is the top leader of the situation, with 55 percent of marriages ending in divorce. Only 13 percent og the divorce rate is held by Guatemala.

Divorces are also steadily increasing in China, noted Eunice Yu and Jianguo Liu, the authors of the study. Divorce rates in China have traditionally been low.

Liu urges governments to publicize the environmental costs of divorce proven by this study, and couples to consider the potential impacts of a divorce before going ahead.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and funded partly by the National Institutes of Health.