According to a recent study by Jianguo Liu, an ecologist at Michigan Sate University whose analysis appeared in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, divorce is bad for the environment. Each time a family splits one household becomes two and households with fewer people are not good for the planet, Liu concludes.

In 2005, there were 16.5 million households headed in the U.S. by a divorced person and a little over 60 million households headed by a married person.

Liu calculated that per person, divorced households spent more per person per month for electricity compared with a married household.