By Sid Perkins
Divorce often takes a devastating emotional toll on families, and it has significant impacts on the environment as well, a new study suggests.
When couples split and form additional households, it dramatically boosts the consumption of water, land, energy, and other resources. In many parts of the world, such resources are becoming severely limited, says Jianguo Liu, an ecologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
In the year 2000, nearly 15 percent of U.S. households were headed by divorced people, U.S. Census Bureau data suggest. The separation of families aggravated urban sprawl, boosting the number of households by more than 6 million and increasing the number of rooms to be heated and cooled by almost 36 million, says Liu.