Environmental responsibility

Expanding our recycling efforts

Following years of commitment and hard work, two Oshkosh Defense manufacturing facilities achieved Silver level TRUE Zero Waste Certification. Team members worked together to conduct waste sorting events and found new recycling outlets for each facility to expand recycling efforts to include vehicle components such as mudflaps and windshields. This ultimately resulted in more than 90 percent of waste from these two facilities diverted from landfills. An additional program, "Bags to Benches," converts plastic shrink wrap and polyethelyne plastic foam from our manufacturing operations into benches, which are now utilized throughout our facilities. 

Renting to reduce waste

Using more than 800,000 returnable containers annually has helped us save 761,905  pounds of cardboard waste, 12,170,973 pounds of wood waste and 408,597 pounds of shrink wrap since the rental program's inception in 2013. The program is used by more than 150 suppliers working with JLG, Pierce, McNielus and Oshkosh Defense, resulting in a net savings of nearly $4 million per year. The program also reduces CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions as the newly stackable freight system minimizes the number of trucks needed to complete shipments.

Painting VOCs out of the picture

We adopted an alternate approach to component painting—one that reduces both emissions and costs. The new technology, which replaces “wet” solvent-based coating with a dry powder coating, reduces green house gas emissions by roughly 30 percent, even with a 50 percent increase in production volume. The system also eliminates volatile organic compounds emissions associated with solvent-based paints, limiting our environmental impact while cutting costs by over $850,000 per year and significantly increasing paint-chip resistance.