just camping out. for breaking news. or little stores on the big stage. you start listening to the w. . even. if you go in for dr cycle wall crown parts of germany any time lately you may have come across huge advertising billboards asking the question if we can stop global warming or create a fair a world and how many of us think about the products we buy where they came from and inmate them is it our job the consumer all the responsibility of multi 1000000000

euro corporations shareholder pressure is starting to make boardrooms more accountable and t.v. commercials tugging shop is a clear trend here in europe at least is towards green and fair. i'm not here to pull at your heartstrings but any football mom or dad would sleep better at night if they knew their kid was kicking around a soccer ball that hadn't been stitched together by the tiny hands of a boy or girl around the same age on the other side of the world in pakistan where officials have failed after decades of if it's to fully eradicate child labor. soccer is a global sports whether it's children or adults playing for fun all the pros like in the german bundesliga it's a global business with billions but what if the soccer ball went to come from. most of them come from c.l. kit in pakistan for decades the city has been the world's largest producer of

soccer balls thousands of local people work in the industry. in the past all the balls was sewn by hand but times have changed at least at this company . it produces $160000.00 cycles a year many in automated production. the industry used to be in the tourists many workers took the balls home with them with family members including children stitched them by hand. in how to produce everything in-house and we only allow people who are 18 or over to work in our factory. our focus is on producing high quality balls. to achieve that we have to provide more benefits and good wages to our workers benefit. just because a bird became in 2015 game or was certified as a fair trade company indicating that it meets international standards for working

conditions. and between different rates of sirius radio company has to have a fixed labor contract with all its employees with agreed working hours better working conditions rights to representation within the company all workers are entitled to simulate a maternity leave. and these are all conditions that the whole company has to adhere to. at dell based on the supplier for the german bundesliga all the soccer balls are made in pakistan. peak times the headquarters in germany sends out nearly 100000 balls and the management here is satisfied that its partner company of pakistan does not. check on that by ensuring that you know soccer balls are produced in private homes 20 years ago. we were able to monitor the process. but has the industry

really changed even now only a fraction of. the conditions. the mayor of seattle. that working conditions have improved he says there was a lot of international pressure. we have a level of compliance with worker standards and action of workers rights can't be found anywhere else in pakistan. pay for social security benefits for our employees. these things didn't exist before. complied with employer protection standards the pricing is becoming more competitive. but they hit. with a fair trade certification still the exception and 5 to 10 percent more expensive.

isn't a fair trade product. fair trade balls is negligible. only make up about 45 percent of overall sales. because the fairtrade c.e.o. is high profile in the industry or amongst the clubs. to be. back to pakistan and. the company says it wants to become a role model for the entire industry. manages hearsay custom is and always willing to play ball and shell out more for their products. other than european union are scandal barred from the european union and the scandinavian countries bias from other regions we don't value the fair trade seal more because they don't like the higher price but if you want you can be a role model for fair trade not only to provide additional benefits for our workers

but also so that our workers put more effort into the fair trade products because they know these provide them with extra benefits and premium sub. extra benefits. despite the lack of industry wide standards it's clear that working conditions insufferable production have improved here over the last decade but then if it's cost money and there's now a very real risk that parts of the production could be transferred to dover weights countries like china only on mom where working conditions may not be fair or even monitor it. and just because it's fair trade isn't 100 percent guarantee there inspectors can't be everywhere all the time now to something that is free it shines from time to time here in germany and the nations being ranked among the world's top installers of solar panels for several years now the stats aren't all that impressive when you take a look at solar power as chunk of the overall energy makes the same goes for most

other countries time to crunch the numbers with use. it's astonishing it's lean energy from the sam solar energy has become the cheapest way to generate electricity it's even cheaper than coal and yet it produces only 3 percent of the world's electricity. why don't be using way way more of how did it get so cheap. and what does all this have to do with. dux. let's find out. first let's take a look at how much the price for solar has fallen. i started this job as. a 1005. i thought it would get less expensive from chase as the head solar analyst at research from bloomberg pay about.

$0.20 for that. and that is just the last 15 years if you look further pack the price drop is even more impressive how did this happen that's been a long story but it's unbelievable greg remembered has written a book about this. no one country did it it was a exchange of one country building on another one the us created the technology the modern day solar cell made from silicon was invented in the us the 954 back then and many got used in the space industry and was still super expensive but as the technology progressed prices started to fall to germany created a market in 2000 germany passed a law to boost renewable energy development this will speak because it put a fixed price on energy generated from sources like wind or solar people and companies a reason to set up solar panels and for them to do that someone needed to build the

solar panels 3 china made it cheap once the german laws came into force china really started to pump out their solar cells so basically if there were whole industry for this on a scale that the west really didn't keep up with china words almost a non existant player 20 years ago and today they're the biggest producer of solar panels about 70 percent of the world's production so this is how we ended up where we are now clean energy that also makes business sense. but if solar is so great why don't we rely on it much much more and just switch off all these 30 power plants well sold us always had this one big problem. it only really works when the sun is shining. when it's cloudy or even worse dark even the best solar cells are pretty useless and that's a real shame because that's when we need them the most. let's take

a look at how we use energy in the morning when most people get up and get ready we need energy. the so-called daca of charts our demand for power from nonrenewable sources like coal and gas throughout the day 1st in places without much so after the morning spike it stays pretty level. when people come home in the evening it goes up again and then drops at night. at this point you might get an idea why they call it that curve because it kind of looks like a duck. anyway in places with lots of solar like california this curve changes the mornings are pretty much the same vendor sun rises and solar energy production kicks in this lets demand for nonrenewable energy drop. until the sun sets that yes that is one conventional demand shoots up again way steeper than in the 1st curve 2 problems with this one traditional power plant suck and ramping up this quickly that means you have to keep them running at

a certain output all day even though there's lots of solar and that means that you could end up with actually more power produced in a day this year and that leads to the 2nd problem there are limits to how much energy you can put into the grid too much solar could overpower it so it needs to be thrown away this has always made it super difficult to add lots of solar to power systems but guess what there is now a solution to this chances are you have part of it in front of you right now a lithium ion batteries. we're just taking the same construction stringing together many many of those cells and making battery packs that we can use for cars and then we can also scale that up to use for stationary power to to go next to win or solar . what's been quite. well. built with. storage in the battery.

from the day. in the u.s. for example the state of new mexico just decided to shut down a coal plant and instead to build new solar farms that store large amounts of the energy they produce and batteries lithium ion batteries have become a lot better and a lot cheaper than expected in the last few years and they're now a viable option for storing and shifting at least a few hours worth of solar energy is needed so the storage problem that's always sad is actually not that much of a problem anymore. sometimes though we might want a longer term storage places without much sunshine for example and that's why companies are offering other solutions let's just run through. another type of battery called a flow battery separates the charging outside so that has 2 advantages it can store more energy and for longer the problem is still relatively expensive.

hydro storage which is already used quite a bit you need 2 legs and one of them needs to be on a hill during the day you use solar energy to pump water from the lower leg up to the highly when you need energy you can just let it run down through a target but for that you need to find legs and the hill. another solution using gravity comes from wisconsin it's working on a tower the traces building blocks with solar energy and then real. leases the energy. space also the option of using solar to produce hydrogen and with that hydrogen number of things like fuel costs or even make steel the whole process pretty costly i think that. there are alternatives it's just the. batteries are.

expensive. but they do have other attributes like the charger longer which. has become cheap and has pretty much fixed its biggest problem so what's next is going to be big. so. i would not be surprised if by 2030 we're talking about solar doing a large part of the world's. solar is common. with now that the technologies in place it really looks like it's time to shot. just like if you like this piece and similar topics and make sure you visit our planet a you tube channel. but when it comes to investing your money how much of it supports green initiatives especially if you leave it up to

a hedge fund or exchange traded fund reporter the frankfurt stock exchange chelsea delaney took a look at how easy or hard it is being green. list stretches of cream. and tundra of the art tech. lush south american jungles this is what climate activists want to say from destruction but can fighting against climate change also make you rich. my friend lizzy's started investing last year through a trading app mostly buying popular tech stocks but she also cares about the environment and she wants her investments to reflect that. and it's not just her. millions of people have taken to the streets in recent years to protest climate change and that movement has.