Kroger: Not All That’s Green is Environmentally Friendly

The Kroger Company (KR:  NYSE) has been around since the late 1800s.  It has developed into a major retailer of a broad range of food products in its supermarkets that also feature specialty sections such as pet centers, electronics, apparel, toys, and pharmacies.  Kroger stock is selling at a bargain multiple of 6.6 times trailing earnings.  The 2.0% current dividend yield is icing on Kroger’s cake. Kroger is distinguished among other grocery retailers with its pledge to achieve zero waste.  The company is aiming to recycle or reuse at least 90% of its waste.  Sustainable product packaging is a central part of its zero waste plan.  For example,...
hasbro toy

Hasbro: Super Heroes Go ‘Green’

Captain Marvel will arrive in a plant-based box if toy manufacturer Hasbro, Inc. (HAS: NYSE)carries out its plans.  A year ago the toy maker pledged to use plant-based PET (polythylene terephthalate) or BioPET for at least 30% of the blister packs and plastic windows used to ship and display everyone’s favorite super heroes. This is not the first of Hasbro’s attempts at more responsible packaging.  By 2015, the company was using recycled and sustainably sourced paper for 90% of its packaging and in-box content.  Additionally, by 2016, Hasbro had already begun using recycled PET, eliminating the use of additional fossil fuels and removing plastic...

GE’s Mark Vachon: “Gas is massive”

Marc Gunther How’s GE’s ecomagination  going? I put that question today to Mark Vachon, who is vice president for ecomagination at General Electric (GE). He replied by talking about natural gas. “The large macro trend of gas is massive,” he said. “Our oil and gas business will be a huge beneficiary.” An abundance of shale gas in the U.S., and methane gas reserves in Australia present a wealth of opportunities for GE, which plays all along the supply chain for natural gas. “We’re a massive player in gas exploration,” Mark said. “We have a water business that can deal...

Water Gleaner Stocks: Value In Sludge

by Debra Fiakas CFA There are well over 3,000 companies around the world that are involved in some element of wastewater treatment, providing a broad mix of technology, equipment or engineering services to generators and collectors of fouled water.  A small group in this wide field is gaining visibility  -  the ‘water gleaners.’  Like the peasant women picking up stray grains of wheat left behind in the empty field of Millets famous painting, some see value in effluents, sewage and run-off.  In this post we look at three small-companies with novel technologies to harvest water. New Sky...

What John Kenneth Galbraith Would Have Said About the Credit Crunch

John Kenneth Galbraith, renowned economist and author of the bestselling The Great Crash, 1929, died in 2006, and so he never saw the crash of 2008.  But he would not have been surprised.   I just finished reading his A Short History of Financial Euphoria: Financial Genius is Before the Fall, a treatise on bubbles and busts of history, starting with the Dutch Tulip Bubble of 1637 and ending with the crash of 1987. The book was written in 1989, but the message is still timely today.  Galbraith draws out the common factors of all financial...

Water Quality Stocks

by Debra Fiakas CFA Pipes, pumps and values are only part of the drinking water story we began telling last week.  The Ecological Society of America estimates that the U.S. spends more than $2 billion annually on clean water projects in an attempt to prevent pollution and clean contaminated water.  Water quality is a diverse market, beginning with projects to promote natural ecosystems which are the ultimate ‘water filter.’  The market extends to water treatment facilities, filtration systems and purification technologies among other solutions to ensure that our drinking water is safe. The market for water quality...

Water Utilities Keeping The Flow In Cash Flow

Fiakas Water Utilities Keeping The Flow In Cash Flow by Debra Fiakas CFA After a long series of posts on suppliers of water infrastructure, from fire hydrants to filters and from taps to treatments, it is now time to look at the companies selling water.  The majority of water utilities is owned by municipalities and is beyond the reach of investors.  However, there is a clutch of publicly traded companies that peddle water as a business. Which water utilities make sense to return hungry and risk wary investors? A short...

Trex: While The Sun Shines

by Debra Fiakas CFA It appears to be the ‘summer of the small-cap’ as performance in the sector outpaces other sectors on the first day of summer 2016.  In keeping with the adage “make hay while the sun shines”, we shifted into a higher gear to find promising small companies that might participate in the small-cap renaissance.  Trex Company (TREX:  Nasdaq) bubbled to the top of a couple different screens based on growth and return.  There is much to like in a company delivering strong growth.  A bargain price is just icing on the cake.  With a ratio...

Exclusive Report: How to Profit from Global Warming!

Dr. K. Global warming worriers like Al Gore are missing the many wonderful things that global warming will bring to the world, not to mention the many opportunities to profit from this so-called "climate catastrophe."  Global warming isn't about hot weather, it's about hot stocks in your portfolio.  A new report tells you the stocks to buy now! Global Warming is the greatest opportunity for investors in a generation.  Some stocks may fall, but others will be headed upward like a the famous hockey-stick chart from the 2001 IPCC report.  For just $499.95, you can buy my...

Tall Neighbor Coming to Arizona Desert Community

by Debra Fiakas CFA The citizens of a San Luis, Arizona are about to get a new, very tall neighbor.  Solar Wind Energy, Inc. (SWET:  OTCQB; formerly Clean Wind Energy Tower) recently secured 600 acres in the area to build a solar wind tower.  This is a unique design that takes advantage of air heated by the sun’s power utilizes.  Fast cooling of the air creates a powerful downdraft that drives turbines at the chimney base.  Solar Wind expects the generators attached to its turbines to produce up to 1,250 megawatts of electricity that can be...

Mueller: Solid Profits In Liquid Infrastructure

by Debra Fiakas CFA The dire condition of drinking water systems in the U.S. has been made glaringly apparent with the recent debacle in Flint, Michigan that has left numerous citizens in the community suffering from chronic health conditions as a result of contaminated water.  We had no further than our own coverage group to find a company that could help solve problems the drinking water system.  Mueller Water Products (MWA:  NYSE) is a supplier of water meters, pipe fittings, valves, pipe repair components, and fire hydrants.  Mueller’s Echologics leak detection solution gives water utilities details on water...

Ammonia-Fueled Combustion Engines are Coming

A while back, Jeff, one of our readers pointed me to an announcement on ammonia fuelled irrigation pumps. Late last week, Jeff sent me another link to Market Watch's coverage of the Ammonia Conference in Algona, Iowa. In the article, Ted Hollinger, President of Hydrogen Energy Center (HYEG.OB), outlines the company's efforts to produce ammonia fueled engines. From the article: HEC projects their ammonia-fueled engines will produce 2.33 times more horsepower than a gasoline-fueled engine and plan to have finalized systems ready for sale in 2008. "Ted Hollinger's presentation was one of the highlights of the...

Vacation, Updated Graphs, and 2 Conferences

Vacation and Meet Me at the Colorado Renewable Energy Conference or the International Peak Oil Conference. Tom Konrad, Ph.D., CFA I'm on vacation this week, so I'm going to leave you with a preview from a presentation I will be giving at the Colorado Renewable Energy Conference on Aug 29 in Golden Colorado. I'm updating my Investing in Renewable Energy presentations, and I've been able to incorporate a lot of the work Charles and I did on clean energy mutual funds and ETFs since January this year. ETF Holdings Revealed Charles did some in-depth work...

Lunch With Warren Buffett

Tom couldn't attend to his usual Monday column this week so he asked me to step in. My own investing has been partially on hold over the past couple of months as I have been watching developments in the markets, so I figured I would open the week with something a little lighter albeit not entirely unrelated to alt energy and cleantech investing. Deflating Valuations = Happy Value Investors One of the good things about the current state of equity markets for alt energy investors is that several great company's stocks that had been trading at...

Bush’s State of the Union

"America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world" Thanks to Mr. Bush's state of the union address last night, we should see some nice gains across the board in the Alternative Energy sector. Some of the big winners may be the Ethanol companies like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Pacific Ethanol, Inc. (PEIX). The EnergyStockBlog.com has a nice write up on the potential for ADM. GreenCarCongress.com has a nice summary of the important parts of the speech. In his State of the Union 2006 address, President...

Water Infrastructure: Opportunity Coming Down The Pipe?

by Debra Fiakas CFA The most recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gives a grade D+ for U.S. infrastructure as of the end of 2013.  Not a very good grade, but an improvement over the plain D grade that had been handed out four years earlier.  With the travesty of the water contamination in Flint, Michigan during 2014 to 2015, the ASCE report should carry special interest.  The threat to the health of the Flint community could be found in anywhere in the U.S. The executive summary of the ASCE 2013 report does...
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