Living single? You’re not alone. Rising incomes, higher divorce rates, lower fertility rates and fewer multi-generational families living together are all contributing to a shrinking household.

In Canada, the proliferation of single-person homes is the major factor driving down household size. In St. John’s, for example, population decreased by half a percentage point, but the number of single-person households grew by more than thirty per cent between the last two census periods.

But more people living alone doesn’t just mean more applications to The Bachelor. Throughout the world, smaller household size is emerging as one of the biggest threats to the environment — while putting a strain on singletons’ mental and financial health. Here are a few ways the swinging single lifestyle is wreaking havoc.

Road to ruin

One of the main by-products of the decrease in household size is urban sprawl. According to a study in the January 30 issue of Nature, “more households mean more housing units, thus generally increasing the amount of land and materials& needed for housing construction.”

More than twenty per cent of Canadians live in the Golden Horseshoe Region, Canada’s urban sprawl hotspot. The area accounts for almost half of all population growth. Now, the Ontario government is proposing a $1.2 billion highway that would cut a concrete gash 100 km long through the Niagara Escarpment, some of the Golden Horseshoe’s most precious farmland and forests.

Urban sprawl threatens green spaces and conservation areas and puts a strain on agriculture, water and the climate. “In some areas you may clear a forest, in some areas you may clear agricultural land, and in some areas you may even clear people,” says Michigan State University Professor Jianguo Liu, one of the co-authors of the Nature study.

Flat broke

Small packs of multicoloured cereal aren’t the only things that will tug at singles’ purse strings — average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver is $743, while a two-bedroom is $919. With a flatmate, the two-bedroom place will save you almost $300 a month. The Tenant Rights Action Coalition says that one quarter of all B.C. households pay fifty per cent or more of their monthly incomes on rent, and half of B.C. households pay more than thirty per cent.

High energy

It takes about the same amount of energy to heat an apartment regardless of the number of people who live there. Meanwhile, declining household size is one factor in the growth in ownership rates for small appliances (microwaves, computers, TVs, VCRs, DVD players, etc.). These minor appliances are major consumers of energy. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in one year a single digital cable TV converter will use half the energy of a dishwasher. Small wonder that a typical Canadian singleton’s ecological footprint — the measure of an individual’s environmental impact — is more than twenty per cent higher than the national average.

Nice package&

A 2002 survey conducted by the marketing research company AC Nielsen, found, not surprisingly, that singles — both young and old — are more likely to buy single-serve items like frozen entrees, which send more packaging to the landfill than normal or bulk sizes. Add that to the trash toll of take-out, cleaning supplies and Oscar Mayer Lunchables. Packaging accounts for a third of all trash and it is estimated that 10¢ out of every dollar spent at the store goes to pay for it. Think about it this way: a 425g box of Froot Loops costs $4.49, a Kellogg’s Variety Pak of assorted cereals containing ten single-serve boxes with a combined weight of 270g costs $4.69.

Bachelor padded cell

A 1999 study done at the University of Bristol found suicide rates were higher in areas where more people lived alone. Another British study found that single men over forty-five had a fifty per cent chance of dying prematurely and were also more susceptible to long-term illness.

So are we turning into a nation of Travis Bickles? Bruce Alexander, a psychologist at Simon Fraser University, believes declining household size is an index for what he calls dislocation, the breakdown of psychosocial relations. He sees the rise of single-person dwellings as a product of the free market society. “The kinds of problems we have in an extreme free market society are the excesses of individualism,” he says. He warns that individualism is becoming pathological, manifesting itself most acutely through addiction, whether to injection drugs or Ikea lampshades.