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.

#stocks #Investing #InteractiveBrokers

@freemo

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.

@kravietz @freemo hmm. how's that? seems consistent to me?

@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.

@freemo @2ck

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.

@2ck

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.

@kravietz

@freemo @2ck

> A wind turbine is essentially a bit of copper wire

And a large gearbox filled with a few hundreds of liters of gearbox fluid that needs to be replaced and recycled.

> regular old waste here, not toxic waste

Define toxic :)

@amerika

That may or may not be a bad thing.. They tend to be made of glass or carbon composite so im not sure there is much need to recycle them as we have a surplus as it. I'd have to investigate a bit more to have strong opinion on this particular case but in general recycling for the sake of recycling isnt always the best answer, sometimes that makes things worse and does nothing to help (as is the case with most plastics).

@2ck @kravietz