As it turns out, divorce is harmful for the planet too, not only for those involved. A new study has proved another inconvenient truth: divorce is not green. Jianguo Liu and Eunice Yu at Michigan State University, the authors of the study, which links the divorce rates to effects on the environment, has yielded some startling numbers.

They discovered that 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.

The two researchers also studied what happens when single or divorced people are returning to family life. The study compared married households with households that had weathered marriage, divorce and remarriage. The results have shown the environmental footprint shrunk back to that of consistently married households.

"People’s first reaction to this research is surprise, and then it seems simple. But a lot of things become simple after research is done. Our challenges were to connect the dots and quantify their relationships. People have been talking about how to protect the environment and combat climate change, but divorce is an overlooked factor that needs to be considered," Jianguo Liu said.

Apparently, divorced households use between 42 and 61 percent more resources than their married counterparts, the Michigan State University study says. Also, divorced people spend more on resources, up to 46 percent more for electricity, and 56 percent more on water, than cohabitating families.

The study was published in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Not only the United States, but also other countries, including developing countries such as China and places with strict religious policies regarding divorce, are having more divorced households," Liu said. "The consequent increases in consumption of water and energy and using more space are being seen everywhere."

The National Marriage Project at Rutgers University reports that rates of divorce are rising around the world, while they are actually dropping in North America. But this happens because of a drop in marriages, which in fact has the same ill effects as divorces. Divorce Magazine claims that the top world record is held by Sweden, where 55 percent of marriages end by divorce. On the other end of the spectrum is Guatemala, with a mere .13 percent divorce rate.