About the Coalition
Organizing for clean air, good jobs, and healthy communities at the Ports of New York and New Jersey.
OUR MISSION
The Coalition for Healthy Ports is a bi-state alliance organizing for zero emissions, clean air, good jobs, healthy communities, and environmental and economic justice at the Ports of New York and New Jersey — and throughout the logistics industry. We bring together environmental and environmental justice groups, labor unions, faith leaders, truck drivers, and community advocates, with particular focus on the port-adjacent communities that have carried the cost of goods movement for too long.
COALITION HISTORY
How It Started — and the Arc Since
2007
How It Started
The Coalition for Healthy Ports was founded in 2007 as a bi-state alliance of environmental and environmental justice activists, truck drivers, faith leaders, labor unions, and community advocates organizing across New York and New Jersey. The communities surrounding the Port of New York and New Jersey — the largest port complex on the East Coast — had spent decades bearing the public health costs of one of the busiest goods-movement corridors in the country. Children in Newark’s Ironbound and South Ward neighborhoods, in Elizabeth, in Bayonne, and on Staten Island were growing up with some of the highest rates of childhood asthma in the United States. Workers at the port were dying earlier than they should. And the institutions responsible for the port were not acting at the speed the crisis required.
CHP formed to change that. The founding coalition recognized that no single organization, neighborhood, or sector could move the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey alone. The work would require environmental groups and labor unions in the same room, Newark residents and Staten Island residents recognizing a shared fight, faith leaders alongside policy advocates, truck drivers alongside the scientists studying what diesel exhaust was doing to their bodies. The coalition’s first task was to make that alignment possible.
The name was deliberate. Healthy ports — not just clean ports, not just green ports — because a port serving the public good has to be healthy for the workers inside it, the residents around it, the air above it, and the regional economy depending on it. Those are not separate issues. They are the same issue, and the coalition was built to treat them that way.
2010–2011
The First Decade
In its first decade, CHP built the public pressure that moved the Port Authority to begin regulating the dirtiest diesel trucks entering the port. In March 2010, the Port Authority announced a truck ban effective January 1, 2011, removing all pre-1994 diesel rigs. CHP welcomed the step and immediately named what it left undone: thousands of polluting trucks would remain, and the cost of upgrading would fall on independent drivers earning $10–11 an hour rather than the shipping companies profiting from goods movement. That dual framing — celebrate the progress, name what’s missing, refuse to let workers carry the cost — has shaped CHP’s voice ever since.
2013
Into the Courts
In 2013, the coalition moved from advocacy into litigation, becoming a named plaintiff in federal litigation against the U.S. Coast Guard and the Port Authority over the Bayonne Bridge raising project, arguing the agencies failed to assess the public health and environmental consequences for surrounding communities. The case showed CHP would use every tool available — organizing, press, policy, and the courts.
2015–2016
“Employ Us — Don't Poison Us”
In 2015 and 2016, CHP campaigned alongside Newark Mayor Ras Baraka under the banner “Employ Us — Don’t Poison Us,” demanding modern low-emission engines and local hiring for port jobs. When the Port Authority abandoned its committed Clean Air Strategy in early 2016 — walking back a pledge that would have cut port diesel emissions by an estimated 90 percent — CHP called the decision a disgrace publicly and kept organizing.
That period also produced one of the coalition’s most enduring wins. In July 2016, the City of Newark passed the first-in-the-nation Environmental Justice and Cumulative Impacts Ordinance, requiring developers to disclose pollution impacts before site-plan approval. Drafted and proposed by NJEJA and allied groups — CHP among them — it set a national precedent.
2020
A National First
In September 2020, that precedent reached the state level. After decades of grassroots advocacy from communities from Camden to Newark, Governor Phil Murphy signed S232 into law — the nation’s first state environmental justice statute requiring mandatory permit denials when a new facility would cause disproportionate cumulative impacts on overburdened communities. The implementing rules were finalized in April 2023, making New Jersey the first state in the country with environmental justice cumulative impact regulations on the books.
2021–2026
The Fight Continues
In December 2021, New Jersey became the first state on the East Coast to adopt the Advanced Clean Trucks rule, requiring manufacturers to steadily increase zero-emission truck sales. CHP had organized for that outcome for years. In December 2024, when the Assembly Transportation Committee advanced a measure to delay the rule by two years, CHP mobilized fast enough to head off a full floor vote before the session closed. The fight to defend the rule continues into 2025 and 2026.
Today, the Coalition for Healthy Ports remains a bi-state alliance organizing for zero emissions, clean air, good jobs, healthy communities, and environmental and economic justice — with particular focus on the port-adjacent communities that have carried the cost of goods movement for too long.
COALITION MEMBERS
Steering Committee
The Coalition for Healthy Ports is led by a steering committee of four organizations:
Clean Water Action
Steering Committee — Coalition Chair
To protect our environment, health, economic well-being, and community quality of life. Clean Water Action organizes strong grassroots groups and coalitions, delivers on campaigns to solve environmental and community health problems, and works to get environmental candidates elected at all levels of government.
Areas of focus: Reducing diesel pollution at New Jersey’s ports and warehouses; advocating for zero-emission standards in goods movement.
Ironbound Community Corporation
Steering Committee — Founded 1969
Ironbound Community Corporation’s mission is to engage and empower individuals, families, and groups in realizing their aspirations and, together, work to create a just, vibrant, and sustainable community. ICC upholds and builds upon the principles of “Justice and Equality for All,” working toward a Just Transition and organizing community on the basis of the Jemez Principles. ICC envisions a safe, healthy, just, and nurturing Ironbound — a welcoming, fully inclusive community where current residents can remain in their homes without fear of displacement.
Areas of focus: Clean air and clean energy; community-led air quality monitoring; stopping construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure; the Indirect Source Review rule.
New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance
Steering Committee
The New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance is an alliance of New Jersey-based organizations and individuals working together to identify, prevent, reduce, and eliminate environmental injustices in communities of color and low-income communities. NJEJA supports community efforts to remediate and rebuild impacted neighborhoods — using the community’s own vision of improvement — through education, advocacy, public policy, training, organizing, and technical assistance.
“As a member organization of the Coalition for Healthy Ports, NJEJA is actively supporting the campaign for ‘Good Jobs, Healthy Neighborhoods, & a Clean Environment’ to ensure workers and residents within port communities are prioritized and protected in the fight for environmental and economic justice.”
South Ward Environmental Alliance
Steering Committee
South Ward Environmental Alliance is an environmental justice organization serving Newark’s South Ward, fighting for clean air, healthy neighborhoods, and the protection of port-adjacent communities.
Areas of focus: Environmental justice in Newark’s South Ward; port and diesel pollution; community protection and empowerment.
PARTNERS & ALLIES
Partners & Allies
Earthjustice
Supporter / Partner — not an official member
Earthjustice is a national environmental legal nonprofit that believes everyone has a right to a healthy environment. In New Jersey, Earthjustice works closely with community groups like CHP to advance environmental justice objectives related to air pollution, goods movement, electrification, clean energy, and upholding the Environmental Justice Law.
Areas of focus: Goods movement; port electrification; environmental justice.
The work doesn't stop. Neither do we.
Add your organization or your voice to the coalition.