In 1983, EHC launched the Household Toxics Project, which focuses on identifying and removing harmful toxins in houses in local San Diego residences.
In 2010, the EHC got the West Side National City Specific Plan approved, and oversaw energy stimulus money going towards San Diego residents on low income.
Joy Williams served as the Research Director from 1987 to 2020 and received the Haagen-Smit Award by the California Air Resource Board (CARB) in 2019.
The coalition works to inform the community members about the dangers and tangible effects of pollution on quality of life in order to encourage individual activism.
In addition, the EHC advocates for government intervention to create change in policies which aim to serve the protection of human and environmental rights.
In this way, the EHC aims to work on a local, state, and national level in addressing social and environmental issues.
The EHC hopes to implement its mission through the use of grassroots campaigns to eliminate consequences of toxic pollution, discriminatory land use, and unsustainable energy policies.
[1] The Environmental Health Coalition was part of a Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and was tasked with helping to determine the effects of industry in Old Town National City, CA, United States.
The EHC believes that its research has led the way for a media focused campaign to increase the awareness of the problems that the community faced.
In 2018, the EHC achieved its goal of cleaner air and public health in Barrio Logan by reducing the frequent heavy duty truck activity on the nearby streets.
The effort to reduce the effects the diesel-powered machines were causing was led by David Alvarez, chair of the San Diego Environment Committee.
This still leaves structures such as, schools, retirement homes, and residential areas at risk of exposure to harmful contaminants like ultra-fine particulate matter.
The Arroyo Alamar river originates from Eastern San Diego County and is one of Tijuana's last native wildlife hotspots.
Human emissions has led to a decline in biodiversity, including the loss of habitats for waterfowl, mammals, marine life, amphibians, and crustaceans.
The EHC have been working to preserve the land and to prevent further construction and habitat destruction by hosting educational tours for the community in order to generate public awareness.
However, many working families in San Diego County are struggling to access job opportunities, visit the doctor, and get groceries due to how inaccessible and unreliable the current transit system is.
[4] In the San Diego region, passenger and light light-duty vehicles are the largest contributor of Greenhouse emissions, but adding more transit systems can reduce that.
[7] The 10 Transit Lifelines are goals of reducing greenhouses gas emissions, decrease lung-damaging air pollution, and meets the needs of the low-income communities of color separated into 10 categories.
[8] Many landscaping workers in California experience migraines that they accredit to exhaust from gas powered leaf blowers, lawn mowers, etc.
Barrio Logan is a neighborhood in San Diego that is concentrated with waste and recycling facilities, an interstate running through it, and an outdated city plan.
The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment and EPA developed a method of screening called CalEnviroScreen 3.0 and determined that Barrio Logan has a disproportionate number of pollution sources in their neighborhood.
The tracked emissions do not include diesel because of monitoring differences, but the county still oversees 3000+ facilities that emit some sort of air pollution.