Communities for Clean Ports

Communities for Clean Ports is a non-profit public resource for individuals and organizations fighting to end the port-related pollution that poisons people, fouls the environment and costs billions of dollars – and that is about to explode as port-related trade triples over the next 15 years. CCP works alongside allied organizations large and small—from environmental and community groups, to social and economic justice organizations, to organized labor and other advocates for workers. Like no other issue, Port Pollution Poisoning directly and intimately connects the daily lives of real people to environmental action, public health, and social and economic justice. Ending port pollution – and the unjustifiable health and economic tax it levies on innocent working people in port communities – is a moral imperative.

The time to act is now. Cleaner technologies, equipment and alternative fuels are affordable, viable and on the market – and would immediately and drastically reduce Port Pollution Poisoning. All that’s lacking is immediate, significant action by the port-related and goods movement industries – the trucking, shipping, rail and other transportation and retail companies who have increased their profits for years by shifting the massive economic and health costs of port pollution to their fellow Americans living and working in port regions.

Starting in Southern California, there is a historic opportunity for long-term, paradigm-shifting public education and mobilization that will reverberate across the country. The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the two largest container ports in America, sit side-by-side and historically have generated a “Diesel Death Zone,” much of L.A.’s smog, and higher rates of cancer, lung disease and dangerous childhood asthma. Nowhere is port-related pollution a bigger problem – or major pollution reduction more possible, especially in the wake of the Ports’ recent Clean Air Action Plan (CAAP).

But that is just the beginning. Up and down the West Coast, communities, environmentalists, organized labor, activists and visionary public officials are pressing to reduce port-related pollution.