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Love this new tool I've been using from Interactive Brokers. I tell it what I care about ethically and it grades my stock portfolio based on the companies I invest in and their adherence to my moral preferences. Its a great way to invest and ensure you do so with an ethical motivation.
This is one of the portfolios I use for algorithmic trading. I'm trying to program into the algorithms a sense of ethics in how it trades and it seems to be working.
Avoiding "hazardous waste" *and* "greenhouse gas emissions" looks quite contradictory 🤔 so I'm a bit concerned that this "caring ethically" is nothing more than a selling point targeted a specific customer sector.
@2ck @kravietz Yea that confused me as well. If i prop up a wind turbine, which is little more than some metal blades, some wire, and a magnet, I am clearly reducing green house gas emissions.. Yet I wouldnt suddenly out of no where be dumping toxic waste in a river as a consequence of this decision... makes no sense, not sure what he really means.
Life-time of PV panels and wind turbines is 20-30 years.
After which they become, well, "toxic waste" with high content of metals such as cadmium. They require careful decommissioning, recycling and waste management.
Failed PV farms did contaminate vast areas with heavy metals in the past.
@kravietz @freemo I hadn't really thought about recycling PV panels since I've never been in the position of acquiring them. PV recyclers do exist http://www.pvcycle.org/press/pv-cycle-and-recycle-pv-solar-announce-integrated-partnership-for-recycling-in-usa/ . Reclamation is much lower than it could be, but are you saying that you think these efforts will fail? If not, continuing to invest in solar and expanding the portfolio to include solar recycling seems like an appropriate course of action.
The recycling of solar panels and wind turbines is a perfectly reasonable concern.. but to call them "toxic waste" is a bit of a leap. A wind turbine is essentially a bit of copper wire, a magnet, and some metal, there is little if anything toxic about it. As for solar panels, they to have very little toxic components, particularly if they are RoHS compliant in which case they wont even have lead (pretty much the only significant toxic component).
So really we are talking about regular old waste here, not toxic waste. Like i said while that should be addressed its hardly a counter point considering the massive amount of things we use in our daily life and toss that are far more concerning in terms of waste. Hell every personal computer has far more lead in it than a wind turbine or solar panel.
Toxic waste is waste which is significantly poisonous to humans, by definition.
Gearbox oil would be considered toxic waste for example, and obviously is miniscule compared to the amount of oil it prevented the consumption of in its lifetime. Plus we already have good recycling infrastructure when it comes to used oil. So there is that added benefit that the oil isnt even being consumed in that case and just gets recycled anyway.
> obviously is miniscule
This is a tempting heuristic, but nothing is obvious in the energy industry.
The reason is we're now comparing terawatt-scale nuclear and fossil installations with megawatt-scale PV and wind installations.
While issues such as air pollution or coal ash are widely visible at the terawatt scale - because of the scale - they only start becoming visible for the emerging technologies.
Yes ultimately you'd have to do what most science papers on the topic do.. Evaluate toxic waste produced by a solar panel with the amount of energy it produces in a life time.. the amount of toxicwaste per watt hour, then do the same with fossil fuels... As becomes obvious fossil fuels are many many orders of magnitude higher.
Nuclear is another matter though, I see nuclear as mostly green and put it in a similar category s wind and solar.
@freemo @2ck
100% agreed with the former postulate and this is partly captured by surface power density and GHG emissions because both indicators are calculated for life cycle, which includes mining, operations and decommissioning, each stage producing waste. Indirect, but I think it's strongly correlated.