2010 Sustainability Report - Cummins.com

Rising to our
environmental challenges
At Cummins, our employees love a good challenge.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that when challenged to
harness their knowledge, skills and muscle for the
environmental benefit of the communities where they
live and work, the response was overwhelming.
More than 3,200 employees from 11 countries worked
an estimated 33,450 hours on projects. Greenhouse
gases were reduced by 538 tons, the equivalent of
54,000 gallons of gasoline.
The Foundation awarded 13 grants of $10,000 each
in 2009. Five of the 13 projects were judged to be
President’s Award winners. Here are their stories:
Positively illuminating
Lighting up Kolha, India
Like many remote villages in India, activity pretty much
stopped in the village of Kolha not long after sunset.
That is until August 2009 when a Cummins
team developed a way to power the rural village of
65 households by using Cummins generators running
on a locally available renewable energy source –
non-edible vegetable oil produced from the seeds
of Pongamia trees.
“Ever since Cummins forayed in India half a century ago,
we have been committed to deploying our technology
and human expertise towards the development of both
the nation’s economy and its people,” said Anant J.
Talaulicar, President, Components Group, Cummins Inc.,
and Managing Director – Cummins India.
“We believe that this rural electrification initiative using
locally available, low cost, renewable energy sources
is an important first step taken in the direction of
electrifying remote villages and making people’s lives
better in the rural sections of our nation,” he added
at a ceremony earlier this year celebrating the
A family in the village of Kolha in India enjoys the benefits of
electricity thanks to a Cummins project using generators fueled
by an inedible vegetable oil.
first phase of the initiative, one of the Environmental
Challenge’s President’s Award winners.
The Kolha project started two years ago when
Cummins India Limited collaborated with the Cummins
Engine Research Facility at IIT (Indian Institute of
Technology) Bombay and the READ Foundation to
develop a sustainable electrification model for remote
villages across India. The collaboration wanted to use
locally renewable energy sources that would minimize
overall carbon emissions.
70 Cummins Inc. Sustainability Report 2010