At the height of Super Storm Sandy, Cummins Power Systems’ Steve Philips went 21 hours without sleep, his phone ringing 40 or 50 times per hour until he finally nodded off at his New Jersey home, his computer and cell phone in his lap. Three hours later, he was back working the phone again, trying to find generators for desperate customers in New York and New Jersey left powerless by the mammoth storm.

Kent Roberts has a very personal connection to preserving a 5-acre parcel of oak trees and other vegetation in Mineral Point, Wis. where the Community Involvement Team at Cummins Emission Solutions has been working for the past three years. The park-like area, known as an oak savanna, is named for his former teacher who started the preservation effort.

For much of the past year, workers on the second shift at Tata Cummins Limited Plant 2 in Phaltan have witnessed something rarely seen on a shop floor in India after 7 p.m. Women. Women are now working from 2 to 10 p.m. in the plant at Cummins’ Megasite, about two hours southeast of Pune. They normally are not allowed to work past 7 p.m. but Tata Cummins is one of a select number of manufacturers given permission by the government to allow women to work the second shift.

Cummins South Africa employees decided it was not enough to merely increase recycling in Alexandra Township, an informal settlement of Johannesburg, South Africa, near the Company’s offices in Kelvin. To really address Alexandra’s problems, they had to look for ways to reduce the area’s population of rats – some the size of small cats. And the best way to control the rat population, they concluded, was to encourage the growth of the owl population, a natural predator but long considered a symbol of bad luck in South Africa.

The Cummins campus in Guarulhos, Brazil, is near several major highways and São Paulo’s international airport. Traffic in the area is frequently bumper-to-bumper. Green space is limited. But over the past three years, nearly 800 Cummins employees have planted some 5,000 trees in the area. Not only has their work helped beautify the city, the air is cleaner, dust has been reduced and temperatures are down in some areas.

​​Passengers traveling between the borough of Hackney and historic Victoria Station have been given a glimpse of the greener future of London’s iconic bus system. A new bus inspired by the original double-decker Routemasters and powered by a Cummins ISBe 4.5 litre engine, carried locals and visitors using state-of-the-art hybrid technology.

Major infrastructure upgrades can be very capital intensive, and the Jamestown Engine Plant (JEP) in western New York hadn’t seen many over the last 40 years. All that changed in 2012, however, including the plant’s approach to energy use.

Water can be a scarce resource in certain regions of Mexico, but Cummins plants in the country have implemented a variety of initiatives to use the resource wisely. At Cummins New and ReCon Parts in San Luis Potosi, plant officials are monitoring soil moisture in green areas to create efficient irrigation methods. They harvest rainwater from a cistern with a capacity of 3,612 cubic meters and 17,000 square meters of grass were replaced with native vegetation that consumes less water.

In Fridley, Minn., Cummins is making significant strides to reduce production waste thanks in part to a partnership with Rise, Inc. The local not-for-profit helps create job opportunities for people who have significant disabilities and other employment barriers. The Rise employees work on a variety of tasks including the plant’s recycling efforts, which have increased significantly in recent years. Along with other steps, Cummins Power Generation in 2012 eliminated 34 percent of the solid waste that had been going to landfills – an annual cost savings of $28,000.

Indiana’s largest beer and wine distributor has announced it will convert 85 percent of its heavy duty truck fleet to Cummins Westport engines fueled by compressed natural gas. The Monarch Beverage Company is partnering with Cummins and several other companies on the project, which will include an on-site compressed natural gas fueling station to be completed by March, 2013.